I guess we need to talk about the national debt, since everyone else is talking about it. This past month, there was yet another freak-out over the really big, scary number.

There were the usual reactions: the country is “broke,” we’re never going to pay off this debt, the dollar will collapse, the entire U.S. budget will be just paying interest and everything else will be crowded out, et cetera.

It’s all bullshit, of course. But what I found fascinating was a different reaction.

Around the same time as the debt numbers came out, there was a report that the financial guru behind the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki, was 1.2 billion dollars in debt!

Yes, you read that right, $1.2 billion, with a ‘B’.

However, for the nerds of Hacker News who are obsessed with the national debt, their reaction could not have been more different than it is when discussing the national debt. Some examples (my emphasis):

“Depends what interest, contingencies and on other information to understand if 1.2B debt is a problem or not. Otherwise, for most UHNW [ultra high net worth] people, debt is just a number on a balance sheet.”

And

“What’s ironic is that the book goes to great lengths to explain this. The entire point of the book is: use leverage to grow assets.

The alternative, not taking debt and using income to directly pay expenses, is literally called out as the “cash flow pattern of a poor person”!

Agree with his financial strategy or not, it’s very clear that accumulating debt was part of the plan, not some failing of the plan.”

And:

“this is misleading. it’s debt like a mortgage, not as in that he is literally broke.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49551438

Wait a minute! So the very same people who constantly freak-out about the national debt and say the United States is “bankrupt” see no issue whatsoever with this financial guru being 1.2 billion dollars in the hole.

So, to reiterate, to the Hacker News nerds, one single, solitary individual who personally owes over a billion dollars is no big deal. But a sovereign, democratic nation-state, one with the world’s second largest economy and third largest population occupying the most fertile and temperate climes of the North American continent which literally issues its own currency is “broke,” “bankrupt,” in a “crisis,” and is going to collapse any day now due to its “unsustainable” debt load, which, according to them, will “never be repaid.”

That’s a very different reaction, isn’t it? Why is one debt good and the other bad? In fact, you can find this national debt hysteria on a weekly basis on Hacker News, just as you have since the site’s inception.

In reality, as we know by now, the government’s liabilities represent the assets of bondholders, both private and institutional, both domestic and foreign. And the United States also holds the debt of other nations as assets, which is always somehow forgotten in this equation. And, just like the author named above, the debt can be an investment in the future of the country which improves the lives of its citizens (in this particular instance, that’s not the case, and we’ll get to that in a bit).

This comment gets it right:

Bingo! Any country borrowing in its own sovereign currency cannot default on debt in that currency, unless it actively decides to do so for political reasons.

The typical response is that this debt will somehow cause massive (hyper-)inflation, and dollars won’t be worth anything anymore. That it will “debase” the currency. But this is just as false as the narrative that the country is “bankrupt:”

Do you think that printing money automatically causes inflation? How does that work? Do people have some kind of magical device, or is it a physical phenomenon that can be measured? Of course not. Printing money only causes inflation if it is spend in a way exceeds the capacity of the market.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123258

All that happens is the Federal government swaps one kind of asset for another. And typically, the returns are used to buy more bonds, which would not be inflationary, since it is not converted into cash. If it is converted into cash, and spent all at once, that could potentially be inflationary. But it’s important to note that the debt isn’t a lump sum owed on a specific date and time. It’s spread out over various time frames, from six months to thirty years. And the solution to an excess of money is always the same: taxes.

If government spending creates new money, then taxes destroy it. That is, taxes “unprint” money. Even if an excess of money does cause inflation (which is doubtful), that excess money can be removed via taxation.

Whenever you point this out, people smugly assert that this will not work because taxes need to be passed by Congress and are politically unpopular. This is always said as some sort of “gotcha.”

But that self-satisfied response neglects a very important fact. For a modern currency regime to work, taxes need to be collected as well as money spent into the economy. Without that, no economic regime can function. As we know, a sovereign currency issuer does not need to collect taxes for revenue (states and municipalities do), but taxes are needed to adjust the supply of currency in the economy to its capacity to produce goods and services.

Yet, while there is plenty of anger over government spending allegedly causing inflation, there is no anger about this essential lever of financial control being taken away from the people. That’s telling, isn’t it?

And that 40 trillion number is interesting in itself. Double it and you get 80 trillion. According to research by Carter Price and Kathryn Anne Edwards, if growth in the economy had been more equitably distributed, the bottom 90 percent of workers would have earned an additional cumulative 79 trillion dollars between 1975 and 2023—almost twice the “unsustainable” gap.

That represents a lot of potential income that’s not taxed. They find that all that income went to the top ten percent of the income distribution—you know, the very same people who got the vast majority of Republican tax cuts.

Essentially, we’ve been borrowing from the rich instead of taxing them, creating ever greater inequality.

You sometimes hear that the wealthy don’t have enough money to tax in order to close this gap. But that doesn’t make any sense. If the wealthy have enough money to lend to the government, then they clearly have enough money to pay taxes.

Good debt, bad debt

Now, as we’ve seen, debt can be a good thing or a bad thing.

We could have a high deficit because we’re giving people health care, child care, a secure retirement, or because we’re fighting childhood poverty, building high-speed rail, constructing affordable housing, developing the electrotech economy, and so forth. During the high debt of the pandemic years, for example, child poverty actually declined, and evictions were halted.

Instead, the reason the deficit is so big now is almost exclusively because of tax cuts.

For example, look at this alarmist and scaremongering article from “The Conversible Economist:” A US Federal Budget Chartbook. This is pretty typical of the conventional economists’ view of our “unsustainable” debt path, and how we must implement “austerity” and cutbacks to fix it.

What is doesn’t tell you is why the deficit is as large as it is. Look at the red portion in that chart of “unsustainable” debt. Now look at the chart below.

The orange line shows what the projected deficit would be without Republican tax cuts. It looks a lot more manageable doesn’t it? What it shows is that the reason the debt is “unsustainable” is entirely because of tax cuts on the wealthy!

Of course, this is by design.

I found the timing of this latest debt freakout interesting, given that it’s happening just as democratic socialism is gaining ground and Democratic candidates who support a more robust role for the government are leading in the polls in several states. This might herald a sea-change in the Democratic Party back to it's New Deal roots, which is long overdue in my opinion.

The debt is very convenient as a way to diffuse the calls for a more robust social safety net, as well as any other investments in the country and its people. It’s what’s known as the “starve the beast” strategy. Deprive the government of revenue, and then claim things like Social Security and Medicare are “unaffordable” and “unsustainable” and must be slashed. Eduardo Porter explains the strategy in The Guardian:

…the OBBBA, the latest chapter in the Republican’s fiscal path of destruction, did cut spending – $1tn-plus from Medicaid and food assistance programs for the poor. But that was no match for $5tn-plus worth of tax cuts doled out largely to the most affluent Americans.

And this leaves Democrats, again, in a budgetary pickle. If the optimistic predictions come to pass and they win control of both houses of Congress in November and the presidency in 2028, they will arrive into the seat of power with at least one hand tied behind their back.

Ambitious, expensive ideas like Medicare for All or allowances for families with children will struggle, given the ballooning deficits and debt Trump left in their way. Even undoing Trump’s cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and subsidies for health insurance under Obamacare will seem forbidding.

Republicans have never been punished politically for their dismal stewardship of the budget. Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden didn’t gain much from efforts towards deficit reduction. But it won’t be easy for Democrats to simply take a page from the GOP’s playbook. Financial markets are jittery. Rising bond yields alone will raise the government’s cost of servicing the debt, crowding out Democratic spending priorities.

That’s hardly the end of it. Once Democrats are in the White House, Republicans will surely rediscover their long-lost concerns about the government’s lack of fiscal restraint, and do their standard budget hawk cosplay thing to force Democrats to fix the budget.

‘Starve the beast’? The $40tn cost of Republicans’ false promises to cut spending (The Guardian)

This was coupled with cuts to the IRS, which make no sense given that the IRS is one area of the government where more spending leads to more revenue, not less.

The IRS slashed its staff. One result? More taxes going uncollected (NPR)

Also note that you didn’t hear “howyougonnapayforit” even once while Trump greatly expanded ICE’s budget, hired thousands of (highly paid) officers, deployed ICE and the National Guard from coast to coast, built concentration camps across the country launched all sorts of ambitious white elephant projects, and started a war in the Middle East. I don’t recall anyone in the media even once asking where the money was going to come from, do you? That’s a pretty stark contrast with when the media discusses things like high-speed rail or universal health care.

We have infinite money for the military/law enforcement/carceral state. But, for some reason, we never have enough money for nice things that benefit average Americans. Anyone who has gone to Europe or Asia knows what a modern, functioning society with good infrastructure looks like. By contrast, we’re a police state. We look like the Soviet Union or East Germany before the fall. That’s ironic, given all the scare-mongering about “Communism.”

The strategy is clear—a war on our own government, waged from the inside by the oligarchy while the plebs are distracted by culture war nonsense peddled by podcasters and online influencers.

Trumponomics

One of my favorite articles I wrote on here described the extensive research into how much better Democrats have been at managing the American economy going all the way back to the Great Depression when economic statistics started being collected systematically for the first time.

And the trend continues.

Not only is the national debt hitting an all time highs with no benefit for average Americans (which, as we saw, is by design), but all the goals of Trumponomics appear to have failed. From what I can tell, the goal was to return the 1950’s smokestack economy, centered around manufacturing in vast factories making things like cars and refrigerators using dirty fossil fuels. But manufacturing employment does not seem to be increasing. In fact, it was higher under Biden:

In spite of the stated goal of creating “manly-man” jobs, almost all of the new jobs have gone to women, because the only part of the economy that’s expanding is the pink-collar “caring” economy:

As Dean Baker notes, not only is the trade deficit not going down due to tariffs, but it still remains high, and is increasing:

Dean Baker

Under Trump, Foreigners are Ripping Us Off More Than Ever: Trade Deficit Jumps in August

In Realityland, a trade deficit is not necessarily a big deal. There can be issues with a deficit, like when the rapid expansion of imports at the start of the century cost us millions of manufacturing jobs, but ordinarily modest trade deficits are not a big deal…

Read more

25 days ago · 34 likes · 2 comments · Dean Baker

And there is no evidence that purging the country of (non-white) immigrants and foreigners has benefited working-class Americans at all (of course, this is taking the economic arguments at face-value, which I think are just an excuse):

Mike Konczal

Can We Find Literally Any Sign Deportations Are Helping Native-Born Workers?

In response to my recent post on women gaining 101% of net payroll jobs under the Trump administration, commentators argued that this was largely about immigration, about native-born male workers taking jobs formerly held by deported immigrants and showing up as no net-new jobs. This turned out to be a total fabrication, it never happened, it’s fiction …

Read more

a month ago · 69 likes · 5 comments · Mike Konczal

Plus, we’ve seen that inflation has gone up due to tariffs and the higher cost of fuel, especially diesel fuel. And mortgage rates are hitting the highest levels we’ve seen this century, even as housing is more and more unaffordable than ever and insurance costs are soaring due to natural disasters and an unstable climate. And the AI bubble, which is the only portion of the economy that’s still growing, is raising energy and computer parts prices for consumers.

So, two years in, we can see that Trumponomics has been a complete and total failure, just like I expected.

After a few years of absorbing this stuff, I thought I’d share the twelve most interesting and eye-opening things I’ve learned over the years from listening to these critical theory sources (books and podcasts).

Now, it’s important to note that I am NOT an expert in any of these topics. I’m merely passing along what I’ve heard and read from others, so if you have an issue, take it up with the original scholars, not with me. For a lot of this, I’m going from memory, so I expect there will be some errors, and there will comments telling me exactly what I got wrong. But I expect that from people who know far more about this stuff than I do.

1. Ancient Israel was not monotheistic.

The preponderance of evidence indicates that the ancient Israelites were not true monotheists, which is defined as the belief that there is only one, single god and no others. Instead, they were initially polytheists who acknowledged the existence of other gods, and then gradually transitioned into the exclusive worship of their own god, known as YHWH (usually transliterated as Yahweh), whom they asserted was the most supreme and most potent of all the gods.

Religious scholars refer to this as henotheism—the worship of a single, supreme god that does not deny the existence or possible existence of other deities that may or may not be worshiped. From there, Israelite religion gradually enforced the worship of one single God, ruthlessly suppressing all other form of worship—sometimes violently. This is known as monolatry. But throughout the Old Testament, there are many signs that the followers of Yahweh did not regard him as the only god. As Robert Wright writes in “The Evolution of God”:

…even Israelites who didn’t worship gods other than Yahweh still believed in their existence. Early affirmations of devotion to Yahweh don’t single him out for being the only god, just for being the best god for the Israelites, the one you should worship. That ancient hymn to Yahweh, “man of war,” asks this question: “Who is like thee, O LORD, among the gods?” Indeed, the Bible sometimes mentions other gods matter-of-factly. In the book of Numbers, for example, where the Moabites are conquered, it says that their god Chemosh “has made his sons fugitives, and his daughters captives.”

And when the Bible doesn’t note the existence of other gods, it may imply as much. The scriptures warn Israelites not to “serve other gods and bow down to them” lest “the anger of the LORD will be kindled against you.” Would the Bible’s authors (here and elsewhere) have warned against “serving” other gods if those gods didn’t even exist? And would Yahweh have declared himself “a jealous god” if there were no other gods to be jealous of? Apparently God himself didn’t start life as a monotheist. Even God’s most famous demand for devotion—”You shall have no other gods before me,” as he puts it in Exodus—hardly excludes the existence of other gods.

In other words, before Israelite religion denied the existence of all gods other than Yahweh, it went through a phase of granting their existence but condemning their worship (by Israelites, at least; if the Moabites wanted to worship Chemosh, that was their business). In technical terms, Israelite religion reached monotheism only after a period of “monolatry”—exclusive devotion to one god without denying the existence of others. (pp. 104-105)

Israelite religious beliefs seem to have been born out of the frothing religious milieu of the ancient Near East rather than something that suddenly sprang, fully formed, out of nowhere. There appear to be three major currents: The northern tradition of worship, centered around the Caananite storm god El and/or Baal and the northern city of Ugarit and other Caananite coastal cities; a southern tradition centered on the exclusive worship of the war god Yahweh among desert nomads (desert dwellers are more likely to be monotheists according to anthropologists), and Egyptian religious ideas from its priesthood imported into Sinai and southern Canaan.

Monotheism—the belief in the existence of only one, single divinity—comes quite late to Judaism, historically. Many scholars have cited an influence of Zoroastrianism as a catalyst for this change, while other scholars disagree. Other scholars have posited an Egyptian influence from the religious reforms of the pharaoh Akhenaten. Scholars have noted similarities between “The Great Hymn to the Aten” and Psalm 104.

I need not go into more detail, as this excellent article describes so well the formation of how the religion of ancient Israel came into existence:

How the God of Israel Was Born. An easy read and definitely worth your time.

2. Our earliest Biblical texts are actually quite late, historically.

Many people might naïvely think that, since the Bible describes events which happened thousands of years ago, the manuscripts we have must date that far back. I certainly thought that way.

But it turns out that’s not true. In fact, they come from much later.

The Septuagint is a translation of the ancient Hebrew scriptures into Greek. According to the legend, seventy-two scholars (seven from each of the twelve tribes of Israel) journeyed to Egypt to translate the Hebrew scriptures from Biblical Hebrew into Koine (that is, common) Greek. The first five books of what Christians today call the Old Testament (the Pentateuch) were translated in the third century BCE, while the rest of the Old Testament is thought to have been completed later around the second century B.C.E.

This Greek translation of the Bible, according to Biblical scholars, was the version apparently used by many of the authors of the New Testament. It turns out that many of the authors of the New Testament didn’t even know Biblical Hebrew! Many diaspora Jews spoke only Greek, just as American Jews today, unless they are religious experts, speak only English, or European Jews spoke only Yiddish, aside from a few prayers and religious terms.

This is illustrated by the Isaiah prophecy (Isaiah 7:14), which seems to indicate that the Messiah will be born of a virgin. The confusion stems from the fact that in many languages the words for “virgin” (i.e. never had sex, which theoretically can apply to both men and women) is the same as that for “young woman.” Other languages make a distinction between the two. Biblical Hebrew makes a distinction, and the word used in the passage is the Hebrew word for “young woman,” or possibly “bride” (‘almâh).

However, by the first century, the Greek word, which originally stood for both, had acquired the meaning of “virgin” (parthenos, as in the Parthenon, the shrine to Athena Parthenos). Thus, if you were reading the scriptures in Greek, it would look like Isaiah is prophesying a virgin giving birth to a son, when in reality what it actually says is that a young woman will conceive and give birth to a child (which makes a lot more sense). That’s right, the virgin birth was never prophesied at all! And if you read the entire passage in its context, it has nothing at all to do with the Messiah, but rather predicts when a siege will be lifted.

Several versions of the Septuagint survive. One of the oldest is exactly where you would expect it to be—the Vatican (the Vatican Codex, or Codex Vaticanus). This dates from the third century C.E. In the twentieth century, an even older version was accidentally discovered in a library in a monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai. This is known as the Codex Sinaiticus (codex being the term for a book consisting of bound manuscripts, as opposed to a scroll), which dates from the late second century.

These two are the oldest complete books of the Bible (we have earlier fragments), which contain the Old Testament, as well as the New Testament, which was originally composed in Greek. That means, remarkably, that the oldest complete versions of the Old Testament comes from several centuries after the life of Jesus in a language they were not originally written in! (with one exception we’ll get to in a bit) The oldest text in the original Hebrew, remarkably, comes from around 1000 C.E.—thousands of years after the events they depict. This is known as the Leningrad Codex, and is in the Russian archives. It is a Masoretic text. The Masorites were Jewish scribes who lived primarily in Galilee during the medieval period who developed methods of copying the scriptures with extremely high fidelity. They also developed ways of signifying vowels. The Aleppo codex is earlier, from 900 C.E., but is not complete. These Masoretic texts are considered to be the most authoritative versions of the Hebrew Bible, but they differ from the Septuagint in some areas.

This was upended by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. These were copies of the Hebrew scriptures created by an apocalyptic cult living near the Dead Sea known as the Essenes. They copied the scriptures and hid them away in pots in caves. These scrolls date from the first century C.E. are are roughly contemporaneous with the life of Christ. That makes them the oldest copies of the Hebrew scriptures—of the Old Testament—ever found. There are over 1,000 different manuscripts.

The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls is seen by many as the most significant event in the history of Biblical studies. Perhaps the most remarkable scroll among them is the Isaiah scroll, which contains the complete book of Isaiah. Remarkably, the Isaiah scroll is virtually identical to the Masoretic texts from a thousand years later! Christian apologists sometime use this as proof that the Bible has been transmitted down to us 100% perfectly. What they don’t mention is that the Isaiah scroll is still around 700 years after scholars believe the text was originally composed. Additionally, there are differences between the other scrolls and Masoretic texts. Jeremiah, for example, is 1/6 shorter in the Septuagint, indicating that it was added to at some point between the Septuagint translation and the time of Christ. Samuel and Kings are also different in the Septuagint, among others.

Oh, and, of course, the chapters and versus were added much, much later.

Great uncial codices (Wikipedia)

3. Many of the stories in the Bible have earlier precedents in the ancient Near East.

This isn’t really news to me—I had already known about the Epic of Gilgamesh for some time. That story contains a flood myth strikingly similar to that of Noah recorded in the Bible. But that’s not the only flood myth from the ancient Near East. There is a partial Sumerian text, and several others as well.

Christian apologists will use this to claim that the Noah story is accurate, and all the other versions copied from it but got many of the details wrong. But the problem is that these alternative stories were discovered on clay tablets that date to thousands of years before our earliest copies of the Bible, as we learned in the point above.

That wasn’t the only influence. Assyriologists—scholars of the ancient Near East—have noted similarities between treaties made by Near Eastern kings and their conquered subjects, and the language God uses to talk to his worshippers in the Bible. One prominent example is the Vassal Treaty of Esarhaddon: Compare The Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon and Deuteronomy 5:7 (Intertextual Bible)

Stories that the authors of the Bible borrowed from other cultures and religions (Threads)

4. The writers of the gospels all cribbed from each other and from other sources.

The four canonical gospels are generally divided into the first three gospels, and John. The first three are very similar, tell a lot of the same stories, are more or less theologically similar. More astonishingly, they crib from each other word for word, indicating that the authors copied directly from each other. For this reason, these are known as the synoptic gospels, meaning “seeing together.” John, however, is very different. It has a very different Christology, and is the only gospel which clearly makes claims to the divinity of Jesus. John also has Jesus giving long, wordy speeches about his true nature, rather than the others where Jesus teaches mainly through parables and short, direct statements. Some scholars even describe John as an early Gnostic gospel.

Most scholars now believe that Mark was the earliest gospel. It’s believed, then, that Matthew and Luke cribbed from Mark while adding their own original material which they got from somewhere else. These lost materials are designated ‘M’ and ‘L’ by Bible scholars (I’ll let you guess which is which). There is also a lost list of Jesus’s sayings hypothesized by Bible scholars known as ‘Q’ (for Quelle, the German word for ‘source,’ not related to the conspiracy theory).

The fact that these four books are really all we “officially” have about the life of Jesus—whom the entire religion is based on—is pretty extraordinary when you think about it. By the way, the attributions of the four canonical Gospels come from much later via tradition. We don’t actually know who wrote them. Only two are actual disciples, while the other two are scribes associated with Peter and Paul. In some cases, it’s pretty obvious that the person whom the Gospel is attributed to is not the one who actually wrote it. Most scholars assume that Jesus’ disciples, being mainly fisherman and day laborers, were illiterate, as were most people in the ancient world. So who wrote the gospels?

This video goes into detail. I recommend watching it at 1.5 speed (24 minutes):

5. There are a lot of additional Gospels besides the four in the Bible.

The four canonical Gospels (from God Spell, meaning “good news” in Old English) were not the only ones written. We’ve since discovered all sorts of additional gospels in many different places. There are at least thirty-nine texts about Jesus which are not in the Bible. Some of these were even known to early Christians. The most famous of these today are Gnostic gospels—the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas—but those are not the only ones. There are also several infancy gospels allegedly describing Jesus’s early childhood.

Wikipedia has a list of these gospels: List of gospels (Wikipedia)

These are also stories about the life and ministry of Jesus, so why didn’t they make it into the Bible? Good question. A lot of these are regarded as what we would call today “fan fiction.” But it does force us to confront which stories are true and which are not (see the final point).

6. Jesus himself never claimed to be God.

This one is quite a mind-blower. The divinity of Jesus is simply taken as a fundamental cornerstone of Christianity. How could it not be in the Bible?

According to critical scholars of the Bible dating back to Albert Schweitzer, who wrote The Quest for the Historical Jesus in 1906, Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic prophet. Apocalypticism1 was a movement within Judaism which believed that the world was coming to an end, and that God’s Kingdom would soon be restored on earth. Jesus was not alone in this belief. We’ve already mentioned the Essenes, the scribes who copied the Dead Sea Scrolls. There’s also the mysterious John the Baptist, whose relationship to Jesus is somewhat ambiguous. At one point in the gospels John baptizes Jesus, which is quite strange if you think Jesus is literally God. Typically the more spiritually senior person is the one doing the baptizing2.

Jesus did claim to be the Messiah. However, the Messiah was in no way or sense a divine figure within the Jewish tradition at the time of Jesus, nor in Jewish religion today. Judaism and Islam both have messiah figures, and, indeed, several people have been identified with, or claimed to be, the Messiah in both of these religious traditions. However, this was not a claim to divinity in either of these monotheistic religions, which would be considered sacrilege.

Instead, the Messiah was seen as a powerful, non-divine, earthly figure. Messiah is an Anglicization of the Hebrew word for “anointed one” (Christ is an Anglicization of the Greek word for the same). Being anointed meant that you were a king, as all of the kings of ancient Israel were anointed to signify their appointment by God. Jesus believed that he and his disciples would rule over the heavenly kingdom to come that God was about to bring about on earth. This is why it was so important to repent and to keep the commandments in Jesus’s teachings. When God returned, he would raise the dead and pass judgement on humanity, where the good people would be rewarded and the wicked punished (about which, more below). But, while the Messiah was chosen by God, he was not, in any sense, God himself.

Only later, when Jesus became seen by Christians as a divine figure, was the office of Messiah elevated to become a form of God in Christianity, and Christianity alone. Furthermore, the Messiah’s role was changed from a powerful earthy ruler to a figure whose mission was to suffer and die for the sins of the world. This was a retroactive change among Christians, and was decidedly at variance with how the Messiah was seen by Jews in the time of Jesus, what was indicated in the scriptures themselves, and probably at variance with how Jesus saw himself.

The synoptic Gospels do not have Jesus claiming to be God at any point, and certainly not the one and only God of the Hebrew Bible. As noted, he does claim to be the Messiah at various points, as well as the Son of Man—another mysterious figure who appears to be a kind of divine judge. But nowhere does he claim true divinity in the synoptic gospels.

It is only in the gospel of John—the chronologically latest gospel—that there are a number of cryptic statements which seem to signify that Jesus is a kind of divine figure associated with the Hebrew God of the Old Testament. “Before Abraham was, I am,” declares Jesus at one point. “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father,” he says at another. The opening of John has passages which correlate Jesus to the “Word made flesh,” and claims that this “Word” dates from the beginning of time. Mysterious statements like these are said to certify that Jesus is a divine being, but in reality, when you look closely at the original Greek, even this is not so straightforward. I don’t have room to discuss why these statements have a certain ambiguity to them, but I would refer you to this episode of the Data Over Dogma podcast (39 minutes):

The elevation of Jesus to divine status is discussed at length in Bart Ehrman’s book, How Jesus Became God. In it, he claims that concept of apotheosis—of mortals becoming gods—has just as much to do with Greco-Roman ideas as it does with Jewish ones. Ehrman discusses these ideas with Alex O’Connor, below (22 minutes):

5. There is no heaven or hell in the Old Testament (or in Jesus’s teachings).

Heaven and hell certainly play an outsized role in Christianity today, especially in the harsh, fire-and-brimstone version of Christianity popular in the United States. But did you know that Jesus’s theology itself had no concept of an afterlife?

This may seem strange. Surely Jesus talked about heaven and hell.

But, in fact, the Old Testament does not have a clear vision of an afterlife. It appears that life is basically correlated with breath (as we noted last time), and when breath leaves the body, the body dies. That is, when you cease breathing, you die—you do not have an immaterial, non-corporeal “soul” separate from your body, nor do you go to some other place. When the breath departs, your body returns to dust. The Old Testament refers to a place called Sheol, which means simply the “grave” or the “tomb,” and is not an eternal afterlife, certainly not heaven or hell as we understand it. And Sheol sounds like a place people definitely wanted to avoid!

Ancient Israelite visions of the afterlife are confusing and ambiguous. The patriarch Enoch “walked with God,” which is normally taken to mean that he did not suffer a physical death (Why? Nobody knows). The prophet Elijah is taken up in chariot of fire whirlwind to “heaven,” but it is unclear what this refers to. King Saul enlists the aid of a necromancer to consult the prophet Samuel on the eve of a decisive battle with his enemies, which presumably means Samuel goes “somewhere” after death. But that’s about it. There is no notion of a last judgement, nor is there eternal conscious torment or reward clearly described anywhere in the Old Testament.

When it comes to Jesus, it appears that he held similar views. Apocalypticism saw a world where evil people succeeded and were elevated to high positions while the good, poor, and decent folk were exploited and crushed underfoot (thank God we don’t live in a world like that today). To resolve this problem, they believed that God would return to establish His kingdom on earth and judge the living and the dead. But God’s kingdom was not some ethereal place in another dimension, or up in the sky. It was right here, on earth. And God would raise the dead, physically, right here on earth by breathing life back into them. It turns out that Beslinda Carlyle was right—ooh, heaven is a place on earth.

Incidentally, this “resurrection of the dead” is still attested to every Sunday when Christians recite the Nicene Creed, which includes it. That seems at odds with the idea of heaven as the place of eternal reward, and the soul being rewarded or punished in the afterlife rather than the body/breath/soul combination. Why would the dead need to be raised if they are already in heaven or hell? Yet this contradiction is never thought about by most Christians.

The living and the dead would be judged, according to Jesus. The good and righteous would be rewarded by sitting at the right hand of God. Meanwhile the wicked would be punished by being cast into the fire. Here Jesus used the term “Gehenna” which refers to the Hinnom Valley in Jerusalem. This is incorrectly translated as “hell.” But when they are cast into the fire, they are burned up and destroyed, not tormented for all eternity. There is no indication of that in the text. In other words, they are cast out forever from God’s Kingdom and cease to exist.

In fact, the Christian vision of Heaven and Hell comes not from the teachings of Jesus, but primarily from a couple of books which did not make it into the New Testament. They are The Apocalypse of Peter (which almost did make it into the New Testament), and the later Apocalypse of Paul, as well as the Book of Revelation. These books were influenced more by Greco-Roman ideas about the afterlife than by Jewish ones. In Greco-Roman philosophy, the “soul” was separate from the body. It was a kind of “shadow,” which could exist in some state after the body had disintegrated. These shadows dwelt under the earth in places like Hades, Elysium or Tartarus. In The Odyssey, Odysseus journeys to the underworld to consult Tiresias. Virgil also features a trip to the underworld for Aeneas to meet his father. These voyages to the underworld are known as katabasis and are what influenced later books like The Apocalypse of Peter, which in turn influenced Dante’s Inferno.

8. Some of Saint Paul’s letters are forgeries.

Paul’s letters form the majority of the New Testament. There are more words written by the Apostle Paul than there are from Jesus himself!

Bible scholars put Paul’s letters into three categories. There are the genuine letters of Paul. These are the ones almost certainly written by the Apostle himself. Then there are the disputed epistles. These are ones that scholars disagree over, including Colossians, Ephesians, and Second Thessalonians. Then there are the spurious letters. These are pretty much universally believed NOT to have been written by the Apostle Paul, which include what are known as the Pastoral Epistles: First and Second Timothy and Titus. Even fairly conservative Christians acknowledge this.

Funnily enough, many passages that express misogynistic views come these spurious texts, including the infamous passage which forbids women from having authority over men. First Timothy 2:12 says, But I do not allow a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.” Who ‘I’ actually is we don’t know. It was some anonymous person, but it certainly wasn’t the Apostle Paul.

9 There are more copying errors than there are words in the entire Bible.

Back in the early 1700s, an English scholar at Oxford University named John Mill (not to be confused with John Stuart Mill), went through and chronicled all the differences between various manuscripts of the Bible. He stopped counting after 30,000.

Since his time, we have discovered an order of magnitude more manuscripts than he had at his disposal—over five thousand. Therefore, when you count up all the discrepancies today, it is a massive number. It is such a massive number that it’s virtually unknown. As Bart Ehrman puts it in his books (quoting his mentor Bruce Metzger), there are more differences between the various manuscripts than there are words in the entire Bible! These are known as textual variants.

Ehrman is quick to note that the vast majority of these textual variants have no effect whatsoever on the underlying theology or the meaning of the passage. But that’s not true for all of them. Occasionally, some of them do matter. In any case, one is forced to wonder how the Word of God, which is supposedly inerrant, has so many transcription mistakes.

In a short paper entitled Persistent Problems Confronting Bible Translators, Metzger describes the nature of some of the transcription errors:

It is understandable that mistakes can arise from inattentiveness brought on by weariness. For example instead of the correct reading, “Is a lamp brought in to be put under a bushel, or under a bed, and not on a stand?” (Mark 4:21, RSV), several important manuscripts read “under the stand.”

This is obviously a scribal error in repeating the preposition “under” in the third phrase. Sometimes a scribe’s error of judgment works havoc with the text. One of the most atrocious blunders of this kind is in the minuscule Greek manuscript no. 109, dated to the 14th century. This manuscript of the four Gospels was transcribed from a copy that must have had Luke’s genealogy of Jesus (3:23-38) in two columns of 28 lines in each. Instead of transcribing the text by following the columns in succession, the scribe of MS 109 copied the genealogy by following the lines across the two columns.

In addition to such transcriptional blunders, which can usually be detected and corrected, occasionally a scribe deliberately introduced into the copy a change that seems to clarify the sense or eliminate a difficulty. For example the older manuscripts of Mark 1:2-3 attribute to the Prophet Isaiah the evangelist’s composite quotation from both Malachi and Isaiah, whereas later manuscripts (followed by the King James translators of 1611) read, “As it is written in the prophets,” an obvious amelioration of the earlier text.

As someone who transcribes a lot of stuff for this blog (including the above), I can vouch for the fact that transcription errors are very easy to make.

There are also late additions to the text. The story of the woman taken in adultery (“Let he has no sin cast the first stone…”) in the book of John shows up quite late. Only in the fourth century does it start showing up in manuscripts, and it was originally in Luke. This indicates that it is probably a later story about Jesus inserted into the text (but a memorable one). And the Gospel of Mark originally ended on a cliffhanger at the empty tomb before a more satisfactory ending was later inserted into the manuscripts.

10. The Bible says nothing about abortion, and its views about homosexuality are not straightforward.

While these are the all-consuming obsessions of Christians today, at least in the United States, the Bible itself is less clear.

The term “abortion” does not appear in the Bible, or even “infanticide.” Jesus’s teaching itself is silent on the issue. The Old Testament appears to view children, including the unborn, as a type of property, proscribing a different penalty for inducing a miscarriage than for killing a fully-born person. Full personhood was considered to be later in the pregnancy, when the breath came. There is also a legal passage in Numbers where a woman who is suspected of falling pregnant by another man is compelled to undergo a trial by drinking a potion which could induce a spontaneous miscarriage (if she’s guilty). Some have argued that this makes the Bible pro abortion, although this may be taking it too far.

As for homosexuality, the Old Testament does condemn it. But the condemnation comes with a huge list of prescriptive rules that Christians do not follow today, from circumcision, to eschewing pork and shellfish, to tattoos, to not wearing clothing with two different types of cloth, and many others. Why are some rules to be strictly followed while others are discarded arbitrarily? And the destruction of Sodom, which is seen as a punishment for homosexuality, is really an interpretation of the text. In reality, it does not specify what the “wickedness” of Sodom was, and it may be violating the laws of hospitality more than anything to do with homosexuality. Lot’s wife is punished for simply looking behind her.

In one of Paul’s letters, he does appear to condemn homosexuals as one of those who will not inherit the Kingdom of God. But the word he uses in Greek is coined by him (a portmanteau of ‘male’ and ‘bed’) whose meaning is ambiguous, perhaps a male prostitute (although it is usually translated as homosexual or sodomite). But he goes on to list several others who will not inherit the Kingdom including thieves, the covetous, drunkards, idolaters, fornicators and adulterers, which would seem to also exclude many Christians as well, including nearly all anti-gay megachurch pastors.

11. The Bible is filled with contradictions

The Bible contradicts other spiritual traditions, but it also contradicts itself. Even the day of the Crucifixion is not consistent. In Mark, Jesus eats the Passover meal with his disciples and institutes the Lord’s Supper by telling them to eat bread and drink wine in remembrance of him. But in John, he gives no instructions to prepare the meal, and washes his disciples’ feet instead of instituting the Lord’s supper. But, most strikingly, in Mark he is arrested, tried and crucified the morning after the Passover meal is consumed, while in John he is arrested and tried a day earlier on the Day of Preparation for Passover at noon.

Bart Ehrman notes this contradiction in his book, “Jesus, Interrupted”:

Noon? On the Day of Preparation for the Passover? The day the lambs were slaughtered? How can that be? In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus lived through that day, had his disciples prepare the Passover meal, and ate it with them before being arrested, taken to jail for the night, tried the next morning, and executed at nine o-clock A.M. on the Passover day. But not in John. In John, Jesus dies a day earlier, on the Day of Preparation for Passover, sometime after noon…

And so the contradiction stands: in Mark, Jesus eats the Passover meal (Thursday night) and is crucified the following morning. In John, Jesus does not eat the Passover meal but is crucified on the day before the Passover meal was to be eaten. Moreover, in Mark, Jesus is nailed to the cross at nine in the morning; in John, he is not condemned until noon, and then he is taken out and crucified. (pp. 26-27)

This is hardly the only contradiction. Not only is Jesus’s death full of contradictions, so is his birth3, which is recorded in only two of the four Gospels. The oldest gospel, Mark, has no birth narrative, but rather begins with Jesus’s ministry.

The differences between the [birth, i.e. Christmas] accounts are quite striking. Virtually everything said in Matthew is missing from Luke and all the stories in Luke are missing from Matthew. Matthew mentions dreams that come to Joseph that are absent in Luke; Luke mentions angelic visions to Elizabeth and Mary that are absent in Matthew. Matthew has the wise men, the slaughter of the children by Herod, the flight to Egypt, the Holy Family bypassing Judea to return to Nazareth—all missing from Luke. Luke has the birth of John the Baptist, the census of Caesar, the trip to Bethlehem, the manger and the inn, the shepherds, the circumcision, the presentation in the Temple, and the return home immediately afterward—all of them missing from Matthew.

Now it may be that Matthew is telling some of the story and Luke is telling the rest of it, so that we are justified every December in combining the two accounts into a Christmas pageant where you get both the shepherds and the wise men, both the trip from Nazareth and the flight to Egypt. The problem is that when you start looking at the accounts closely, there are not only differences but also discrepancies that appear difficult if not impossible to reconcile… (p. 31)

There are many other contradictions, but I think you get the picture. These contradictions tend to be washed away, rationalized, or simply ignored by Christians, who need the text to be consistent for ideological reasons. But that is an imposition on the text which Bible scholars warn us away from (per number 12, below).

12. The Bible is an anthology.

Because it sits in between two covers, we treat the Bible as a single, unified whole. We believe it is one text, and therefore it speaks with one authoritative voice and must be consistent throughout.

But if there’s one thing critical scholars emphasize, it’s that the Bible is not univocal. The Bible does not speak with one, clear, unified voice. Rather, scholars emphasize the pluriformity of the Bible. It is, in fact, an anthology of many different books written by many different authors with different perspectives over a long period of time. We would not expect an anthology of the best short stories or poems to all be consistent and speak with the same voice, for example. And this anthology was written and complied over hundreds—even thousands—of years. The Documentary Hypothesis, a version of which is accepted by most scholars, argues that the first five books of the Bible were compiled much later from multiple authors who are designated ‘J’ (Yahwist), ‘E’ (Elohist), ‘D’ Deuteronomist, and ‘P’ (Priestly).

Similarly, although it’s obvious that the New Testament was written by multiple different authors (although the true attributions are contested), each author chooses to emphasize different things. For example, just like the birth narrative, the Passion narrative is different between the various gospels. This is because each author wishes to emphasize different theological points. Did someone else carry the cross part of the way, or didn’t they? Did the soldiers cast lots for his clothing, or didn’t they? Was Pilate a reluctant executioner or not? Was Jesus passive and silent as he was crucified? Did he understand what was happening? Or did he go to the cross calm and collected, assuaging the people around him including his family, disciples and a fellow crucifixion victim? Did his crucifixion fulfill prophecies of the Messiah in the Old Testament, or is that not very important for Christians?

Nowhere in the Bible itself does it claim to speak with one, single, unified voice, nor does the text itself claim to be inerrant. Those qualities are imposed on the text by Christians for ideological reasons that have nothing to do with what is in the Bible itself.

So there you have twelve (get it?) of what I think are the most interesting revelations from several years of listening to this kind of material. Hopefully I didn’t screw it up too badly.

—Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, and Other Essays, 1925

I’ve gotten sick of talking about politics, so let’s talk about something non-controversial. Let’s talk about religion.

Lately I’ve become very interested in the study of religion as a phenomenon. The sheer array and taxonomy of religions is fascinating—it’s like studying some kind of rare, exotic species like birds, or reptiles, or beetles. When you haven’t picked one of the 5500 or so gods worshiped by humanity as the “true” one, it allows you to look at all of them with the eyes of an outsider, which is consistent with the “Martian’s eye view” through which anthropologists try to look at all human behavior.

The variety is fascinating, but, of course, there is the urge to drill down and figure out what, at base, this phenomenon is all about, and why it exists at all. You simply can’t understand what it means to be human without a thorough reckoning with and understanding of the phenomenon of religious belief.

But what, really, is religion? What is at the heart of it? One of the most fascinating aspects of this concept is that it did not exist for most of human history. If you would have went to an ancient Egyptian or and ancient Israelite, or a member of an uncontacted tribe and asked them what their religion was, they would not understand what you were talking about. There was no separation between the activities of normal life and what we call “religious” activities. We tend to separate these behaviors out in modern life, for example, attending religious services in a specific place at a specific time.

What, then defines religion? What are the commonalities underlying this dazzling array of beliefs, practices and behaviors? That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. From my—albeit quite limited and circumscribed—knowledge of anthropology, I believe I’ve come up with two mental concepts that form the backbone of all religions, regardless of their outward manifestations. They are:

1. That there are noncorporeal entities that exist in the world around us that human beings can interact with. We might call these entities supernatural beings.

2. That this conscious reality is not the only one, but rather there is (at least one) parallel, or alternative reality.

As far as I can tell, these are basic commonalities shared by every supernatural belief system on earth, from small tribes living in the rain forest (like the Pirahã or the Mbuti), to tribal peoples like the Germanic Tribes or Plain Indians, to massive civilizations like Han China and ancient Greece and Rome, to modern-day religions like Islam, Hinduism and Christianity.

Once we have that basis, we can start adding to it, like adding ingredients to the broth base of a soup. Let’s take a closer look at this “religion soup.” Beyond these two common beliefs, we can define two other characteristics that seem to be shared among religions:

1. They all seem to involve means of asserting some modicum of control over random or unpredictable events. By this I mean things like the weather, hunting success, warding off diseases and other misfortunes, and ensuring a favorable outcome.

This can be seen in practices like divination, which seems to be a near-universal practice. This might be an outcome of hunting. I seem to recall reading somewhere that hunters would randomize their actions by rolling knuckle bones as dice. This randomness would prevent prey from being able to predict the hunters’ behavior based on past actions. Another example would be apotropaic magic, which is designed to ward off evil.

2. As a means of coping with our mortality—the fact that we’re all going to die. As the only creature with sufficient frontal lobe capacity to truly comprehend this fact, we are the only creature that can be haunted by it in a way other animals cannot be.

There is, of course, an entire branch of psychology known as “terror management theory” that seeks to explain much of human behavior through this lens. This field is based on Ernest Becker’s highly influential work, The Denial of Death, where he argues that unconscious death anxiety is behind a wide range of behaviors, from works of art, to monumental architecture, to empire-building in politics and business. Every religion copes with human mortality in some way, although, it’s important to note that the cushy, blissful afterlife promised in today’s monotheistic religions is an outlier. This idea was absent even from ancient Judaism which give rise to the major monotheistic religions. However, most religions had some notion of the continuation of consciousness past the point of death in some form. But how, and in what state that consciousness existed, varied greatly.

Since I include supernatural elements as part of my definition of religion, this allows me to know what to include and what to exclude. Any definition is arbitrary to some degree, and this allows us to break off religion from all those other human passions that often get lumped into the “religion” category like politics and sports fandom. Passion, shared rituals, and group membership are important human phenomena, but calling all this stuff “religion” whenever we encounter it makes the word lose all meaning.

This also allows me to arbitrarily distinguish between what is considered “religion” and what is “philosophy.” I argue that, if it does not possess the two fundamental characteristics described above, then it is not a religion by my definition. Take, for example, the perennial debate over whether Buddhism is a religion or a philosophy. Which is it?

Well, as it’s actually practiced, it’s clearly a religion. Anyone who has looked at how Buddhism is actually practiced day-to-day in Asian cultures knows that Buddhists believe in a wide variety of supernatural beings—Tibetan Buddhism is a particularly colorful example of this. But it is possible to follow Buddhist practice without having any supernatural beliefs, and many Western gurus advocate exactly that approach. In that case, I would call Buddhism a philosophy, similar to Epicureanism, Stoicism or Cynicism. The Greek culture which gave us those philosophies made a stronger distinction between religion and philosophy—a distinction more blurry in Dharmic religions like Hinduism or Buddhism.

Naïve Physics

Now, let’s talk a little more about those two basic elements. Where did they come from?

As I see it, they make total sense given the information people had at the time. Let me explain.

Let’s take the first item—the existence of supernatural beings. This is often considered to be a result of Hyperactive Agency Detection (HaAD). This is the idea that we are hard-wired to presume things are caused by some sort of conscious actor, rather than just random events with no cause. This is supposedly evolutionarily advantageous as means of escaping predators.

A more simple explanation is this: since we know that we can have bodies without minds (which is the definition of death), it stands to reason that we can also have minds without bodies.

I have a large flock of doves that I feed on my balcony. Every once and a while, as I’m walking around the neighborhood, I’ll see a dead dove lying on ground. The dead dove looks exactly like the living ones gobbling seeds at my bird feeding trough, except, of course, that it’s dead. But why is it dead? What is the difference between the living and dead doves? Surely, there must be some kind of “force” there. As a wise person once noted, the amount of cells in a living and a dead body are exactly the same. So, it makes sense to conclude that the difference cannot be anything physical. Rather, it must be something nonphysical, or metaphysical. Even today defining exactly what is “alive” and what is not is surprisingly difficult.

Surely ancient people must have thought deeply about the same questions as I do on my walks. Ancient humans were hunters who killed animals for a living. The two things that are obvious when an animal is killed are that the heart stops beating and it stops breathing, When an elderly animal of any sort dies—including humans—without any signs of obvious trauma, they simply cease to breathe.

Which is why many ancient cultures made a connection between life and breath. The ancient Israelites believed that breath entered the body and gave life—God breathes life into Adam, the first man, and breathes life into newborn infants. When a person dies, the breath leaves the body. Ancient Israelites believed that the final exhale was the soul leaving the body. The ancient Greek word for “breath” was the same as that used for “soul.”

More pointedly, we now know that there actually are invisible lifeforms all around us that have agency and seek to do us harm. We call them pathogens—bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungi, and other microorganisms. They are invisible because we cannot see them with the naked eye unaided, and, of course, neither could ancient people. And these life forms have agency in the sense that they want to survive and produce, just like any macroorganism. So there really are invisible life forms all around us—we just conceptualize them differently because we have the tools to see them directly.

So, I would argue, many of these ideas make “sense” from a pre-scientific viewpoint, whether or not you accept the HaAD hypothesis (and I have my doubts).

As for the alternative reality, we all know that this exists because we experience it every night. It’s called dreaming!

Think of how ancient people would have experienced dreaming. Every night, they would be transported to another world where what has been called “dream logic” prevails. In that world, you can die and come back to life, or see and talk to people who have previously died. Reality appears different than in the waking world—more malleable and less rational. No wonder you would believe in an alternative world! Note how many of the world’s myths, legends and stories seem to feature this dream logic. This article defines dream logic as:

1. The nonsensical logic one possesses while dreaming that makes perfect sense until he or she wakes up and,

2. Information one magically/automatically possesses in a dream without having learned it before.

With our modern sensibilities, we see these experiences as being entirely self-generated by our own consciousness, or, rather, our unconscious mind, and assign them to the “fake,” or “not real” category. We claim they are just hallucinations generated by the three pounds of jellied oatmeal inside our skull cavity. But how would ancient people have known this? What would have made them come to that conclusion? They may have observed that the body didn’t move while someone was dreaming, but this only would have reinforced the belief that they must have been transported to another world during the dream.

Not to be too gross, but, as hunters and butchers of mammals, ancient peoples would have been intimately familiar with the vital organs. They surely would have noticed that the brain had a very dissimilar texture and consistency than all the other organs of the body. But it’s not immediately obvious that this is where the seat of consciousness lies. Why would it be? Unlike the heart and lungs, nothing observable physically happens to the brain when the body dies. That’s different than the heart, for example, which may be why ancient people identified the heart as the seat of the soul. Due to its central location in the chest cavity and pumping action, it was assumed to animate living things while it was speculated that the brain was nothing more than an organ for cooling. We still talk like this today—we talk about feelings coming from “the heart” rather than our brain; e.g. “home is where the heart is,” and similar terms such as “heartache.”

It was thought that if the “alternate” reality experienced in dreams could be accessed while awake, you might be able to accomplish things you could not in “normal” life. You could acquire information that you would not have access to, just like in the dream where you know things that you have not experienced directly. You might be able to see or transport yourself to far off-places. You might be able to communicate with supernatural entities, or even the dead (i.e. necromancy). And you might be able to control the weather or predict the future.

This is the idea behind shamanism. Shamans are members of the tribe who demonstrate an ability to go into a trance allowing them to explore this “alternative” reality during waking life. And not just anyone can access these trance states. It’s an innate ability, and often certain people are chosen, as Corine Sombrun discovered.

Another way to say this is that ancient people interpreted all of their sensory experiences as “real,” whereas we moderns make a sharp distinction between the “real” and the “unreal.” But, if you think about, this is hardly an intuitive point of view. Rather, it is a product of our materialist world view, which most ancient people did not share. It’s not at all a “natural” way to think about the world unless you are taught it culturally, as we are. For us, it is simply the water in which we swim which makes it harder to understand how ancient people experienced the world around them.

So you can see why the lived experience of ancient people would have caused them to believe in tings like invisible agents and alternate worlds. This is why early anthropologists argued that animism (a belief in noncorporeal spirits and a living world) and shamanism were the “primordial” religious belief systems out of which all subsequent religions sprang. This idea has fallen out of favor as “universalist” explanations have been treated with suspicion by modern anthropology. But I think there may be something to them and we may have rushed to throw out good ideas with bad.

Other religious beliefs also seem to stem from an intuitive sense. In many cultures, the dead were often said to dwell somewhere beneath the earth. This place was referred to as the underworld and, unlike today’s comfortable afterlife, it was not presumed to be pleasant. This makes intuitive sense, since we bury the dead in the earth, and bodies eventually decompose to become compost. Meanwhile, the sky above was considered the dwelling place of the gods, or else other high places like mountains. These were ouranic, or celestial deities, as opposed to chthonic ones which dwelt beneath the earth. Even today in Christianity, we instinctively go “down” to hell and see heaven in the clouds above us, despite the fact that astronomy clearly shows this is impossible (did Jesus ascend into the troposphere and keep going?). In many shamanic religions, trees were sacred, as their roots penetrated under the earth and their branches reached up toward the heavens, uniting the multiple worlds (as in the Norse World Tree, Yggdrasil).

Two other very common (although not universal) religious practices should be mentioned. One is ancestor worship or ancestral veneration. This is the idea that one’s parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on, do not die, but continue to live on in some form, and that they have some sort of special knowledge or influence over events in the physical world. As a result, in these cultures, ancestors were continually venerated after they died. I’ve previously argued for a link between ancestor worship, the emergence of social hierarchy and military expansionism. Ancestor worship is extremely common in cultures all over the world.

The other is sacrifice—the ritual slaughter of an animal and offering its flesh to the gods. This practice seems to have been almost universal, as we noted when we looked at Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Blood Rites. It’s difficult to find a culture anywhere on earth that did not practice animal sacrifice, or some related kind of ritual bloodletting, and this surely cannot have been transmitted merely through cultural influence. There must be something inherent in it. Sacrifice was seen as an exchange between men and gods—one sacrificed if one wanted something from the gods, and the more valuable the sacrifice the greater the favor asked. After the animal was slaughtered, its entrails were typically examined to discern the future, a practice known as extispicy. These practices probably stem in some way from our time as hunting animals.

To be clear, I do not think any of these things explain the origin of religion itself as Edward Burnett Tylor hypothesized. But it might explain some of the forms religion took in cultures around the world. These were based off of empirical observations and the lived experiences of people themselves in an age before scientific inquiry.

I think the overwhelming amount of empirical evidence indicates that religion evolved for a social purpose. That is, it could only evolve in a social animals like ourselves, and not, for instance, in solitary animals like tigers or sloths. It’s a misapplication of our evolved social intelligence, what evolutionary biologists call an exaption. That’s something which evolved for one purpose, but became “hijacked” to serve another purpose for which it did not expressly evolve. Feathers originally evolved for warmth, but became useful for flight.

A related concept is a spandrel. A spandrel is the space between arches. No one ever sets out to build a spandrel—they set out to build an arched colonnade. However, by creating the arched colonnade, spandrels are automatically formed in the space between them, whether you want them to be or not. The builders of Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Venice decided to elaborately decorate their spandrels to give them their own unique character. This is analogous to traits which were not selected for directly, but rather emerged as “side effects” of others which were.

Whether religion is a spandrel or an exaption, it allowed for more cohesive groups to form which likely outcompeted other groups in the very distant past. It allowed us to bypass bounded rationality and cooperate on a larger scale and in more dispersed groups than other species, perhaps even our own close relatives. This is why it persists today, even in our materialistic, scientific world when we’ve come up with rational explanations to a lot of the mysteries which vexed our ancestors. It’s worth noting, however, that places with good, functioning institutions and a high degree of social trust and cohesion tend to be less religious, although whether that’s an effect or a cause remains to be seen.

Since the start of the catastrophic Iranian “excursion,” there has been a marked increase in discussion over a couple of topics that have long been standard in online discourse. You see these everywhere you look.

My usual disclaimer: I am not an economist, nor do I play one on TV. I’ve simply looked into these topics and determined most of the discourse on them to be hokum, even if I don’t claim to know everything about the topic. I know enough to know that much, and I’m tired of all the fearmongering and misinformation online, especially when so many other topics deserve our attention, so I decided to take on this subject as a public service.

The theories start from the following premises:

1. That the United States dollar has some kind of “official” status as the world’s reserve currency.

2. That the dollar’s value is ultimately backed by petroleum the same way it was backed by gold before 1971. This is the so-called the “petrodollar system,” which supposedly supplanted the previous Bretton Woods system devised in the aftermath of World War Two).

3. That as part of this, there is a requirement to sell oil only for U.S. dollars.

4. That the money Gulf States make from selling oil is necessary to finance the national debt.

5. That if oil were ever sold in any other currency besides U.S. dollars, the dollar’s value would suddenly vanish.

6. That if the U.S. dollar ever lost its official status as the world’s reserve currency, the United States economy would collapse overnight—mass starvation, homelessness, riots in the streets, fire and brimstone raining from the sky, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria.

You’ll find these tenets all over on the internet, so much so that it’s now universally believed by the terminally online. No one even questions these premises—they are simply the received wisdom on forums like Reddit and Hacker News.

Yet it turns out that none of these statements are true. They are simply online conspiracy theories that have taken on a life of their own. Yet I constantly hear the most blatant fearmongering coming from various commentators online, even from those that I normally listen to and respect in other instances. In yet another demonstration that Horseshoe Theory is true, these predictably come from political sources on both the extreme right and the extreme left. Well, I guess they agree on something, even the things they agree on are utter nonsense.

Here’s the truth:

1. There is no single “world reserve currency.” No currency has any such official status. although the dollar is currently the most popular.

2. The value of the dollar is not backed by oil. “Petrodollars” is a term originally used to refer to dollars earned by selling oil on world markets. There is no such thing as the “petrodollar system” (there is, however, petrodollar recycling, which is different).

3. There is no requirement to price oil in dollars, or any other particular currency for that matter, and there never has been—not even for Saudi Arabia. In fact, oil transactions can be—and have been—priced in a number of different currencies over the years. The dollar has been by far the most dominant, but recently more and more transactions are priced in currencies other than U.S. dollars.

4. The value of global oil transactions pales in comparison to the total volume of global trade. In fact, the relative value of oil to the world economy has been steadily falling for a long time.

5. The demand for US dollars is sustained by the sheet size of the US economy and the depth and sophistication of its financial markets, not because oil is priced in dollars. This meant a lot of petrodollars ended up in the financial system, but the dollar’s value is not dependent on this.

6. The United States is not dependent on foreigners to finance its deficit, whether from Gulf states of anywhere else.

7. If the demand for U.S. dollars falls, there will be macroeconomic effects to be sure, but these are well-known and in-line with the predictions of conventional economic theory. The U.S. economy will not suddenly collapse overnight. In fact, demand for dollars relative to other currencies has already been falling pretty consistently over the years, and is currently at a multi-decade low. There is still plenty of global demand for U.S. Treasuries which are considered a safe asset.

8. The strength of the United States’ banking and financial institutions, which really did underpin the international value and popularity of the U.S. dollar, are being rapidly undermined by the incompetent Trump administration which will have lasting implications. That should be the real discussion we’re having online, not silly conspiracy theories about the dollar which are easily debunked.

Let’s start with the reserve currency story.

Reserve Currency Status

In fact, no currency on earth has official status as the world’s “reserve currency.” According to Wikipedia, there are currently 180 currencies in use in the world today. Most of the world’s major currencies are held in reserve by various individuals, businesses, pension funds and central banks.

Of those currencies held in reserve, the U.S. dollar is by far the most popular. This is why it’s often referred to as “the world’s reserve currency.” Thus, it becomes a semantic issue whether or not that is accurate; however, I don’t like using the phrase because it implies an official status that simply isn’t there. As Adam Tooze notes, “It reifies the idea of a reserve currency and obscures how dynamic the currency and financial system is.”

So hopefully that makes it a little more clear. No one is making a binary decision to hold their wealth exclusively in U.S. dollars or not. They have many currencies to choose from, and people can—and do—typically hold their surplus wealth in a basket of currencies at any given time. It makes sense to do so, given that currencies rise and fall with respect to each other all the time. If your wealth is held exclusively in dollars, and mine is held in Euros, and the dollar falls relative to the Euro, then you’ve just lost wealth relative to me. There is no global institution enforcing any currency’s reserve status, nor does any country choose to have its currency be a reserve currency, let alone the reserve currency. It’s chosen by others. As economist Dean Baker noted in 2013:

Being a reserve currency is not a zero-one proposition. The dollar is the preeminent reserve currency, which means that most of the world’s reserves (@70 percent, last time I checked) are held in dollars. However other currencies like the euro, the British pound, the Japanese yen, and even the Swiss franc are also held as reserves.

In fact, dollar reserve holdings have been declining since Baker wrote this. It’s hardly anything new. According to data freely available to anyone on the internet, foreign exchange reserves of US dollars held by central banks around the world fell from 71% in 1999 to 59% in 2021. Currently, as of this year, the U.S. dollar fell to its lowest share of global reserves since 1994.

Yet somehow, the economy has not yet collapsed.

The Petrodollar Myth

The idea that the dollar is “backed” by oil is extremely popular online.

As I understand it, the story goes like this. Back in 1971, the U.S. closed the “gold window”—the convertibility dollars directly into gold. Then, in 1973, it permanently severed the link to gold allowing international currencies to “float” freely against one another.

But the dollar needed something else to back it, or else it would become worthless.

So, in the early 1970s the United States went to Saudi Arabia and hatched a secret deal. The Saudis were the world’s largest oil producer. According to the agreement, they would sell their oil exclusively for U.S. dollars. In exchange, the United States would defend Saudi Arabia and global shipping lanes using its military might. In addition, the Saudis pledged to invest the profits from selling oil back into the United States economy. This would allow the United States to run huge and persistent trade and budget deficits, which it would not be able to do otherwise. These deficits would allow the U.S to afford said military spending, along with all the other features of the “American Way of Life™.”

Because the Saudis were the world’s largest oil producer and a key member of OPEC, all other oil producing nations also agreed to sell their oil exclusively for dollars. This created an “artificial” demand for U.S. dollars. Because every country in the world needed to buy oil, every country in the world had to hold U.S dollars in reserve in order to do so. This is what gave the dollar its status as “the world’s reserve currency.” The dollar is, in effect, “backed” by oil. This is the so-called “petrodollar system.”

Because of this artificial demand for U.S. currency to buy oil, the dollar’s value is inflated even the face of persistent trade and budget deficits. This makes American exports uncompetitive, which is the reason behind the deindustrialization of the United States. At the same time, the money flowing into U.S capital markets led to the financialization of the U.S. economy. Yet, despite deindustrialization and persistent budget deficits, demand for dollars in order to buy oil and the Gulf Oil money flowing back into the United States are single-handedly financing the deficit and keeping the fragile American economy afloat.

If oil were ever sold in anything other than U.S. dollars, the argument goes, this alleged “petrodollar system” would fall apart and the US economy would collapse overnight. When Saddam Hussein priced oil in Euros, that was supposedly an existential threat to the United States economy. This was the “real” reason for the Gulf War (that they won’t tell you about!). With Iran currently selling oil exclusively for Chinese Yuan, these ideas are once again au courant all over the internet.

Furthermore, according to the theory, if the U.S. dollar were ever to lose its official reserve currency status, there would a fire sale of U.S. Treasuries and a flight into Yuan and Euros. The United States would no longer be able to fund its budget deficits because no one will want to buy U.S. debt anymore. Demand for dollars would simply disappear, and the deindustrialized U.S. economy would collapse. In that instance, we would be helpless in the face of such a catastrophe, with no other recourse besides living in a Mad Max movie.

That’s how the story goes, anyway. Hopefully I’ve done it justice and told it accurately (if somewhat tongue-in-cheek).

The Reality

But there are several problems with this story.

First, the U.S dollar was already the major medium of global trade and the world’s most popular reserve currency long before this alleged secret agreement with the Saudis. In fact, it was even more popular than today when it did not have to compete with Euros and nobody wanted Chinese currency. I’m not sure exactly when the United States took over as the world’s paramount reserve currency from the previous claimant—the British Pound sterling—but it was certainly before 1970 (I think it was even before World War 2).

Second, while the U.S. severed the link to gold, under the Bretton Woods agreement no other currencies were linked to gold, either. That meant there was no particular reason to flee the dollar for other currencies, nor was there a need to be “backed” by anything—including petroleum—since no other currencies were, either.

Third, the contents of this alleged “secret” agreement with Saudi Arabia have been public knowledge since 2016 due to the Freedom of Information Act. And, guess what? There was no requirement to sell oil for U.S. dollars in it! Let me say that again: there was no provision in this alleged secret agreement to sell oil for U.S. dollars. It’s simply a myth.

In fact, the reason oil is sold in U.S. dollars is because most international transactions are priced in U.S. dollars. It’s simply easier to denominate transactions in a single currency than 180 different ones. This is widely known and common-sense.

In order for a currency to be widely used in international economic transactions, there has to be enough of it, and it needs to be freely available to end users to use for transactions (for example, no capital controls). The fact that dollar denominated deposits can exist outside the United States outside the control of the Federal Reserve Bank means that it’s easier to procure sufficient dollars for international transactions than any other currency and to hold dollar accounts abroad. This was due to the so-called Eurodollar market.

The Eurodollar market is a complex topic, and I don’t claim to understand it fully. However, it is seen by knowledgeable experts as a much more likely reason for the dollar’s outsized role in international transactions than conspiracy theories about Saudi Arabia and the petrodollar. If you’re a hard-core finance nerd and want to do a deep dive, the excellent podcast Odd Lots did a three-part series about this topic last year. Here’s Adam Tooze writing about it at Chartbook:

Chartbook

Chartbook 348 Dollar-like: eurodollars, crypto and the future of global money.

The three-episode history of the eurodollar presented by Lev Menand and Josh Younger on Odd Lots is one of the best podcasts of recent times…

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2 years ago · 83 likes · 11 comments · Adam Tooze

The real reason for the agreement with the Saudis was to ensure a steady supply of oil to the United States. Recall that this was the early 1970’s. The United States hit Hubbert’s Peak in 1970 and fracking hadn’t been invented yet. There were gas lines around the country due to the oil embargo and the Nixon Administration wanted to ensure a steady supply of from the world’s largest oil producer to bring down prices. Its had nothing to do with ensuring sufficient demand for U.S. dollars (of which there was enough already).

It’s true that the U.S at the time wanted the Saudis to sell oil in dollars, and we did want that money invested in the United States, and we did hold meetings to coordinate these efforts. Prior to this era, oil transactions were roughly 75-25 percent dollars to Pound sterling. After this time, they were nearly all in dollars. Certainly the American government wanted this to happen, but it would be a wild overstatement to say that this was some sort of grand master plan to “back” the dollar with oil instead of gold. As this article notes,

No, there is no such thing as a petrodollar; there never was. These events did not create an entirely new currency, as the petrodollar term alleges, rather a few new entrants into the wealthy national club were welcomed into the existing and by-then well-established global eurodollar framework.

The existing eurodollar network—offshore bank-centered reserve-less money—merely extended oil producers the same full-range capacities that it had developed over nearly twenty years of massive, unrecognized expansion (qualitative as well as quantitative) before 1973.

But the biggest refutation of the petrodollar theory, in my opinion, is simply the fact that the dollar value of oil transactions is minuscule compared to the total volume of all cross-border trade. To put this into perspective, the value of all oil transactions in an entire year is only one-third of the value of cross-global trade in a single day! There are over 200 official trading days per year, so when the numbers are crunched, the value of oil transactions pales in significance compared to the total yearly volume of world trade. Even if every single barrel of oil were priced in some other currency, it would be vanishingly small portion of the total demand for dollars in international transactions.

So selling oil for dollars did not create some kind of “artificial” demand for U.S. currency; nor is it he reason for the dollar’s (implied) reserve currency status, and it certainly does not underpin the dollar’s value in any meaningful sense.

Defenders of this theory will point out that every country in the world needs oil to run their economies and not, say, bananas. But so what? Why does that matter? If all bananas were priced in dollars, would the dollar now be “backed” by bananas (i.e. the bananadollar)? And besides, the relative importance of oil to global economies—even to the United States economy—has been steadily declining over time. Oil was much more important to the economies of the 1970s and 1980s than it is today, so, by this logic, the petrodollar system should have been falling apart a long time before now. And the United States itself is now a net oil exporter.

Besides, there’s nothing stopping anyone from exchanging their currency for dollars, making a purchase, and then converting the money back into some other currency. In fact, that’s what usually happens: when two non-US currencies are being traded: currency A is first turned into US dollars, and then the US dollars are turned into currency B. Dollars are freely available for anyone to transact in, so countries don’t need to keep huge reserves of dollars on hand in order to buy oil. Many entities do hold dollars as a matter of convenience, but that’s simply a choice.

While the petrodollar system itself is a myth, petrodollar recycling is an actual thing. The Gulf States have relatively small populations and sell the world’s most valuable resource to the rest of the world (there’s a reason it’s called “black gold”). This leads to enormous dollar surpluses for them. This is what the term “petrodollar” originally meant. Much of these surplus dollars are invested back into the United States financial system, including buying U.S. Treasuries.

But this wasn’t due to any secret agreement—it’s simply because the United States was the only place in the world able to absorb such large surpluses at the time. And the idea that we need Gulf money to finance our deficits is silly. If you look at who holds U.S debt, the big ones are Japan and China, with Gulf states holding only a tiny fraction of the total. The amount they hold is not significant.

All of what I said is available in this video below, from where I got many of the points made in this post. I find his argument convincing, much moreso than the questionable conspiracy theories floating around online on sites like Hacker News and Reddit.

Ultimately, the reason the U.S. dollar is the world’s most popular reserve currency has nothing to do with a secret pact with Saudi Arabia, or because people need it to to buy oil. The value of any currency is based on the amount of goods and services available to be purchased in that currency; its relative value compared to other currencies (there is no absolute value); and faith in that country’s political and economic institutions.

…while understanding the value of the enormous and volatile foreign exchange markets remains a work in progress, the standard factors that lead investors to buy and sell currencies have to do with changes in national interest rate, inflation rates, and productivity rates. Also, the Federal Reserve can and does adjust the supply of US dollars, and it can take the demand for the US dollar as a global reserve currency into account in doing so.

I always like to show this image below. It correlates the size of each state’s domestic economy with an equivalent global nation-state. Thus we see that, by holding U.S. dollars, you essentially have the equivalent of fifty currencies in one. That alone is a pretty significant incentive to hold dollars. Returns on investments and U.S debt have generally been pretty good for investors. We don’t need to invoke conspiracy theories to explain the dollar’s dominance—people and institutions hold dollars because they want to, simple as.

There are a few caveats, however. The Euro is used by a large number of European states, including by Europe’s single biggest economy, Germany. And, in fact, the Euro has indeed become relatively more popular to hold as a reserve currency. The only other competition would be a single currency from a country with a GDP equivalent to the United States. The only country that falls into that category today is China. However, as Michael Pettis has noted, the Chinese government has bent over backwards to prevent the Yuan becoming the world’s reserve currency. Pettis has even called reserve currency status an “exorbitant burden,” rather than a benefit.

One is forced to wonder why, if being the world’s reserve currency supposedly confers such enormous advantages—so much so that the U.S. economy would literally collapse overnight without it (according to the pervasive fearmongering online)—then why would the Chinese be working so diligently to prevent their currency from becoming the new reserve currency, even as more and more people want to invest in Chinese markets? How do so many other countries manage to run successful economies without having reserve currency status, and why would the U.S. be incapable of doing the same?

Economist Dean Baker has previously debunked the petrodollar theory for The Economist and The Financial Times. More recently, he wrote a short post on reserve currencies which I’ve drawn on for many of my points above:

Dean Baker

The Dollar is A Reserve Currency, not THE Reserve Currency

I continually get people asking me questions and sending me articles about how the dollar might lose its status as the world’s reserve currency and then something horrible is supposed to happen. Neither part of this story makes much sense and treating the issue in this manner confuses what is at stake…

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9 months ago · 37 likes · 8 comments · Dean Baker

If international demand for dollars falls, the dollar will lose value relative to other currencies. This is well-known and already accounted for in standard economic models. There are even arguments that United States might be better off if the dollar loses it’s unofficial currency “status,” although there is disagreement about that:

If the Dollar Stopped Being the Preeminent Reserve Currency It Would Mean More Jobs and Growth (Center for Economic Policy and Research)

Does the US Benefit When the US Dollar is the Global Reserve Currency? (The Conversable Economist)

In the article above, Baker describes some of the effects this might have on the U.S economy, and why it’s not a cause for panic:

If there was a loss of confidence in the dollar, we are presumably talking about a drop in the ratio of reserves held as dollars. Maybe it would fall to 40 percent, perhaps 30 percent. It is almost impossible it will fall anywhere near zero as long as the United States is in one piece with a functioning economy.

The effect of this loss of confidence would not be to deny the United States the ability to borrow in its own currency. Many countries borrow in their own currency, including countries like Malaysia and Colombia, which are not ordinarily thought of as titans of the world financial system.

Less stable countries typically pay somewhat of risk premium based on the risk of inflation in that country’s currency and the risk of the demise of the country (think Yugoslavia). In several cases this risk premium is negative. For example, the interest rates on Japanese, Swedish, and Danish bonds are all lower than the interest rates on U.S. bonds. These countries do not appear to have suffered from not having the world’s preeminent reserve currency.

Falling demand for U.S. dollars would indeed cause the dollar’s value to fall relative to other global currencies. This means that more dollars would have to be exchanged in order to purchase goods from abroad, possibly leading to higher inflation domestically. However, the other side of this equation will be that American exports will become cheaper. A falling currency will also mean it will be less expensive for tourists to visit the United States, possibly leading to an influx of foreign currency from tourism.

Economic Incompetence

However, even if this were to happen, it’s unlikely that any of these gains would be realized due to the Trump administration’s incompetence.

The Trump administration’s position on this issue has been schizophrenic, to put it mildly. On the one hand, Trump demands a “strong” dollar (because “strong” means good and manly, of course). On the other hand, he also want to increase American exports, which would benefit from a weaker dollar. But since “weakness” is gay and feminine, we can’t have that. It’s worth noting that “strong” and “weak” are not value propositions—they are simply the technical terms used by economists to describe currency fluctuations. It’s certain that Trump himself, as well as many of his officials, are too stupid to understand this.

Additionally, Trump himself has repeatedly claimed that U.S. needs to have to the world’s reserve currency in perpetuity. However, as the Conversable Economist article notes, other Trump administration officials have said the exact opposite—that having the world’s reserve currency is an enormous detriment to the United States. So which is it? Does anybody really know? That’s why it’s doubtful the administration will achieve any of its goals. It doesn’t even seem to agree internally on what those goals are.

Supposedly the way to square this circle is through high tariffs. However, all tariffs did was start a pointless trade war, meaning that U.S. manufacturers will be cut out of any future international trade deals putting them at a disadvantage. Retaliation from other countries will mean counter-tariffs imposed on U.S. manufacturers alone, which will put them at a disadvantage relative to other exporters even if the dollar’s value falls. Tariffs have raised the costs of raw materials imported into the U.S., raising the costs for U.S. manufacturers which will be reflected in higher prices. And, in fact, we’ve not seen the trade deficit reduce at all, even as China’s trade surplus with the rest of the world has grown.

As the Conversable Economist article additionally notes, U.S. manufacturing output has steadily increased despite its supposedly “overvalued” currency. This means that it’s doubtful that a devalued dollar will bring manufacturing jobs back. The fact that U.S. manufacturing employment has declined despite increasing output is probably due to automation and efficiency gains. And manufacturing jobs have continuously declined, not increased, since Trump took office. Manufacturing employment is currently near twenty-year lows. Tariffs and banning alternative energy in favor of fossil fuels will not bring back the smokestack economy of the 1950s back to the heartland, and that seems to be the only economic plan the administration has (besides deregulation, corruption and looting).

Tourism to the United States is down considerably since Trump took office and launched his crackdown on foreigners. Headlines about random people being swept up and sent to concentration camps have turned people around the world off on visiting what they see as an increasingly authoritarian regime. Even with the World Cup and the Olympics, travel to the U.S. is lower than expected, so it’s unlikely that we would benefit from a weaker currency in this arena. According to Bloomberg, Trump’s policies have cost US travel industry $40 billion dollars so far. According to another recent economic analysis, the immigration crackdown has not created more employment opportunities for US-born workers and, in fact, has harmed their prospects, as well as cost an enormous amount of money.

Public Notice

Who wants to visit an authoritarian America?

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14 days ago · 687 likes · 49 comments · Brynn Tannehill

But the most lasting damage has been to the United States’ core institutions. The value of the United States dollar and the ability to finance deficits was always due the fact that the United States had the most trusted financial institutions in the world. No more. Everyone around the world cannot help but notice the drastic decline in the political situation in the United States. The rest of the world is looking on as the U.S. rapidly destroys itself from within due to a radicalized Republican Party which is basically a modern-day fascist party. Whenever Trump speaks, people around the world are able to hear him directly without the pervasive sanewashing performed by domestic U.S. media outlets, and they hear the ramblings of an unhinged madman (quite possibly in the throws of dementia). They have also seen the various clowns, cranks and incompetent sycophants placed in positions of power and authority throughout the federal government. One of the most important tasks for businesses is long-term planning, and for that you need reliability and predictability. But the Trump administration is one of the most volatile and unpredictable regimes on the planet. Not exactly where you want to invest your money. As Dean Baker notes, the U.S. dollar has already fallen in value relative to the Euro, and will likely continue to fall further as long as Trump is in office.

Does the fact that Iran is trading oil in Yuan mean that China is gradually taking its place as the preeminent reserve currency? Not yet, and it’s impossible to know the future, but it would certainly be a long, slow process even if it were. A lot would have to change for that to happen. But the destruction of America’s institutions will have dire economic consequences, even if much of the online conspiracy theories, fearmongering and misinformation has no basis in reality. And the loss of 20 percent of the world’s oil supply will have even more dire consequences on the global economy going forward.

So I hope this rundown has proved useful. So, the next time some commenter, media personality, or influencer starts spouting off about the “petrodollar” and how the economy will supposedly collapse once it’s no longer “the world's reserve currency,” you can now know they’re full of shit and probably shouldn’t be taken seriously about any topic ever again.

“The hour of retribution will come!” Adolf Hitler, New Year Proclamation, 1944

“I am your retribution.” Donald Trump, March 4, 2023

Over the past series of posts, I’ve argued that the current regime in the United States is best described as fascist according to the widely accepted definition of the term in political science. The people using “fascist” to describe the Trump administration are, in my opinion, using the term correctly and accurately as I’ve explained citing the work of numerous academics, scholars and historians.

It bears all of the hallmarks of fascist regimes, historically. It easily meets the “fascist minimum” of palingenic populist ultranationalism. It has the same “mythic core” of fallen greatness. It seeks to eradicate the “enemy within.” It searches for scapegoats and foments hatred and polarization. It has secret police, paramilitaries, and armed militias. It has a cult of personality surrounding its leader. It has a vast, well-funded propaganda apparatus that spreads lies and disinformation. It rules by decree rather than through legislative channels and consensus. It is actively hostile to democracy and popular elections. It is socially conservative, reactionary, misogynistic, and violent. It is anti-intellectual, paranoid and conspiratorial. It is populist, authoritarian, and anti-democratic. It is militaristic and expansionist. It is virulently opposed to socialism and equality. It casts its ideological opponents as “communists” and “antifascists” (“antifa”). It merges big business and the state and is funded by wealthy oligarchs. It has the same fundamental ideology, methodology and goals.

I’ve argued that there is no “quantitative threshold” for fascism. There is no “magic number” where these things suddenly phase-transition into fascism. We can agree that the current administration is not as destructive and rapacious as the most infamous and brutal fascist regimes in human history, has a lower body count (so far), and more impediments to its control, while still acknowledging the basic, fundamental nature of the regime. Perhaps we can agree on quality, even if we differ on degree. MAGA is an American fascist movement. Period.

In these series of posts I’ve been very careful to distinguish generic fascism from National Socialism—the regime that controlled Germany from 1933 to 1945 under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler. This regime is better known by the nickname given to it by British intelligence—the Nazis.

So are comparisons between Trump’s administration and the Nazi regime valid? Keep in mind, when we’re making comparisons we’re looking at the underlying ideology, motivation, goals and behavior, not specifics. When people say something or someone is a “Nazi,” what do they mean, if it’s a descriptor and not a pejorative empty of meaning?

I think for most people, what makes someone a Nazi is a combination of authoritarianism, racism, male chauvinism, a lust for power, and a disregard for ethics and morals. It’s an ideology that says life is struggle, the strong should rule, and that power is the only thing that matters. For Nazis, concepts like fairness, equality, justice, morality, compassion, mercy, empathy, and so on, are considered “soft,” “weak,” or “feminine.” When we think of the Nazis, we think of psychopathic, almost gratuitous evil—evil for evil’s sake—divorced from any concrete objective. After all, the racism and cruelty of the Nazis failed to achieve their goals and led ultimately to the ruin of the German nation and its people, not success.

So, are Trump and the members of his administration Nazis? I contend that they are. That’s a bold claim, but we’ve clearly seen a number of factors over the past two years which appear to show that the underlying ideology of the Trump administration is extremely similar to that of the Third Reich, even if it differs in some of the particulars.

There are a number of things which set National Socialism apart even from other fascist movements, including:

• Racism and white supremacy.

• Blood and soil ideology.

• A cult of martyrdom.

• A lawless approach to war and indifference to atrocities.

Racism and White Supremacy

For most people, what defines Nazism is simply antisemitism—the hatred of Jews. That’s almost universally what people think of when they think of Nazis.

But I’m going to make the somewhat controversial argument that antisemitism was not, in fact, the defining feature of Nazism. Rather, antisemitism was the logical outcome of a set of beliefs which manifested as antisemitism in Germany, but could just as easily manifest in different forms elsewhere. Those beliefs are:

1. That “race” is a scientifically-valid biological phenomenon, and that there are discrete biological races.

2. That so-called “racial characteristics” are innate and not socially constructed. Another term for this is hereditarianism or genetic determinism.

3. That races are fundamentally different from one another—as distinct as biological species—and therefore coexistence is impossible. You will often hear racists use the analogy of “dog breeds” when referring to humans, as though dog breeds are a natural phenomenon.

4. That there is a Darwinian struggle between races which mirrors the Darwinian struggle between individual members of that race.

5. That there is a distinct hierarchy of races, with some races inherently superior to others. Modern-day racists like to use IQ tests as their criteria, especially in Silicon Valley where hereditarianism is extremely popular.

6. That the “inferior” race can contaminate the “superior” one and must be kept separate, lest it contaminate the “superior”race. Biological analogies of blood and contagion are often used to describe this phenomenon.

7. That the “superior” race is allowed—or even obligated—to dominate others.

It was a nineteenth-century French aristocrat who first defined this ideology for the Nazis. Arthur de Gobineau came up with the idea of an “Aryan Race” based on the then-novel discovery that Indo-European speaking peoples had migrated into Western Europe from the Pontic-Caspian steppe thousands of years ago in prehistory1. These pale-skinned conquerors were, de Gobineau declared, the “Master Race.”

This idea caught on most strongly in Germany, which had only become a unified nation in 1871. Eventually, many German intellectuals came to believe that the Germans were the direct descendants of these heroic conquerors—the true Aryans. The mystic lodges that were incubators of the German far-right developed “Ariosophy”—the secret wisdom of the Aryans, and studied the Hindu scriptures for clues to the spiritual beliefs of these mysterious people (Heinrich Himmler carried a copy of the Baghavad Gita with him wherever he went).

According to these intellectuals—who were obsessed with pseudo-Darwinian ideas—the Jews were a foreign entity “contaminating” the Aryan race. The Jews originated in the Levant and had migrated into Europe after the destruction of the Holy Land by the Roman Empire centuries earlier. They followed a different religion. They had different customs. They intermarried and kept separate. And they had a disproportionate amount of power and influence, especially in finance, science and academia.

So this was ultimately the source of the antisemitism of Hitler and the Nazi party. Persecution of Jews has an unfortunately old vintage in central and eastern Europe. Pogroms were a regular occurrence throughout the Middle Ages. One scholar found a correlation between areas in Germany which had large numbers of pogroms and votes for the Nazi Party in the 1933 election.

But—and this is critical—antisemitism was fundamentally an outgrowth these ideas. Antisemitism was the form these ideas took in Germany in the early twentieth century, but they could just as easily take different forms elsewhere. And, I argue, that’s what they have done in the United States.

In the United States, you obviously have a different racial hierarchy than in Nazi Germany. In place of Aryans, you have instead “white” which is basically anyone with any sort of European ancestry. In place of the Jews, you have basically “everyone else”— everyone from outside Europe, that is, especially those who have dark skin or are Muslim.

So, while the hierarchy of races may take a different form, it comes from the same underlying philosophy as it did back then.

The concept of “white” is just as made-up as that of “Aryan.” Initially, even central Europeans did not qualify as “white.” Benjamin Franklin classified people as white, black, “tawny,” and “swarthy.” Perhaps surprisingly, he listed Germans and Swedes among the “swarthy.” Basically, the only “white” people were Protestant Englishmen like himself. In a letter written in 1751, Franklin complained, “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”

Since Franklin’s time, “white” gradually expanded to encompass the “Nordic Race.” This included the peoples from Germanic speaking countries—Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the Dutch, Scandinavians (except Finns and Sami), and central Europeans from Switzerland, Austria and Germany. This was where things stood when Madison Grant wrote his book, “The Passing of the Great Race” in 1916, which Adolf Hitler referred to as his “personal Bible.” Grant subdivided Europeans into “Nordic,” “Alpine” and “Mediterranean” types, and proclaimed that the Nordics comprised a “superior race” responsible for all human development.

At this time, Catholic Irish, Slavs, Poles, Jews, and other Southern and Eastern Europeans were not considered “white.” Latin American Catholics were certainly not considered white, even if they were of “pure” Iberian descent unmixed with native peoples. Grant fretted that immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was bringing in “worthless races” who were incompatible with America’s “Nordic Democracy.” Grant’s protégé, Lothrop Stoddard, felt the same way. Stoddard wrote “The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man,” which became the origin of the German term “Untermensch.”

Fast-forward to today, and anyone with European ancestry is now considered “white,” and therefore part of the same “race.” This includes Celtic Irish, Slavs, Italians, Greeks, and other Eastern and Southern Europeans. And, unlike Nazi Germany, Ashkenazic Jews are now considered “white” by the vast majority of Americans today (although, as we’ll see, there is still a very deep and pervasive undercurrent of antisemitism in the American far right). In a review of academic literature on race in America, one reviewer writes:

Revealing the extraordinary malleability of American conceptualizations of race, [Matthew Frye] Jacobson outlines a three-state chronological progression of racial categorization. From the 1790s to the 1840s, in an era of relatively few immigrants, Americans saw people as either white or black. Between the 1840s and the 1920s, a period of massive foreign immigration and pervasive prejudice against various immigrant groups, there emerged a pattern of “variegated whiteness” in which some groups appeared better—whiter—than others. Finally, beginning in the 1920s, with immigration restriction, color again triumphed as a badge of race, and Americans came to see—and celebrate the diversity of—a “Caucasian” race that encompassed diverse nationalities previously deemed racially deficient. “To trace the process by which Celts or Slavs became Caucasians,” Jacobson writes, “is to recognize race as an ideological, political deployment rather than as a neutral, biologically determined element of nature.”

Two books loom large among modern-day white supremacists. Once again, one was penned by a Frenchman, Jean Raspail. “The Camp of the Saints” (Le Camp des Saints) is a dystopian novel from the 1970s describing a flotilla of brown hordes sailing towards Europe from South Asia. The refugees are depicted as literally subhuman—malformed, crippled, diseased, monstrous, and subsisting on a diet of human excrement (seriously). At every opportunity to blow the flotilla out of the water, tender-hearted military men and politicians chicken out at the last minute, giving in to their conscience. This allows the flotilla to make landfall in southern France where the multitude of brown people come ashore and immediately overrun the countryside, raping and pillaging, turning native-born Europeans into second-class citizens and outlawing Christianity. Not exactly subtle.

The other is a book by an American Neo-Nazi, William Gayley Simpson, entitled “Which Way Western Man?” Simpson’s book expresses cultural pessimism heavily influenced by the work of Oswald Spengler. The mammoth tome, at over 750 pages, claims that there is an organized plot by “world Jewry” against “Western Civilization,” and that the Jews deliberately intend to destroy white Christians via immigration. These ideas have been repackaged by another Frenchman, Renaud Camus, as the “Great Replacement Theory” which is at the heart of far-right movements worldwide and has been invoked in the manifestos of a number of mass shooters. Both of these books are well-known and widely read in white supremacist circles in the United States and Europe.

So, I would argue that, even though the current administration does not persecute Jews the way the Third Reich did, many of the same ideas are present.

There is a lot of disturbing evidence that the fundamental ideology of the Trump administration—and of the Republican Party—is White Nationalism; that is, that white people (as defined above) are the only rightful owners of this country. This comes from the very top—the President himself. Columnist Heba Gowayed writes in The Guardian:

A rally on affordability in Pennsylvania on 9 December devolved into a racist tirade when Donald Trump said to the crowd: “We only take people from shithole countries. Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? … From Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people. But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”

Referring to the US representative Ilhan Omar’s hijab as a “little turban”, Trump continued: “She should get the hell out. Throw her the hell out.” His supporters erupted in chants of: “Send her back.”

The rant is abhorrent and factually incorrect, but it does hold one truth – the Trump administration’s vision for the United States is one of a white Christian nation. And the path to accomplish it is through the exclusion and removal of all who do not fit that vision—in other words, through ethnic cleansing.

To that end, Trump and his acolytes have increasingly been using the term “reverse migration” and even proposed an “office of remigration”. The idea, borrowed from white supremacists in Europe, understands immigrants as an inherent threat to the identity of what they imagine to be “white” nations. Immigrants’ forcible and systematic removal – remigration – is envisioned as a way to “restore” that whiteness.

This vision of an ethnically cleansed, white US is being enacted in policy…

This dehumanizing rhetoric directed against black, brown and Muslim immigrants is par for the course for Trump since the very beginning of his political career. It follows a longstanding and consistent pattern of race-baiting2 and dehumanization, often using the exact same words and phrases as Adolf Hitler verbatim:

Trump’s comments comparing his political enemies to “vermin” who will be “rooted out” have been compared by several historians to fascistic rhetoric made by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. During a rally in 2023, Trump stated:

“In honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country—that lie and steal and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible; they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and to destroy the American Dream.”

Since the fall of 2023, Trump has repeatedly used extreme anti-immigration rhetoric by stating that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, which has been compared to language echoing that of white supremacists and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He later claimed that immigrants who commit murder have “bad genes”. According to Politico, his rally speeches contain “what some experts in political rhetoric, fascism, and immigration say is a strong echo of authoritarians and Nazi ideology”. Other fascistic comments include statements that immigrants are the “enemy from within” who are ruining the “fabric” of the country. Trump has stated that some immigrants are “not people”, “not humans”, and “animals”.

At rallies, Trump has stated that undocumented immigrants will “rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill” American citizens, that they are “stone-cold killers”, “monsters”, “vile animals”, “savages”, and “predators” that will “walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat” and “grab young girls and slice them up right in front of their parents”. Donald Trump also threatened to examine the skulls of Jews who did not vote for him.

Donald Trump and fascism (Wikipedia)

Trump later posted a video on social media depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as apes. As recently as March 2026 during the Iran conflict, Trump called into a Fox News program and said of Iranian and Muslim immigrants, “They’re sick people…a lot of them were let in here, they shouldn’t have been let in. Others, they’re just bad, they go bad. There’s something wrong, there’s something wrong there…their genetics are not exactly, they’re not exactly your genetic…it’s one of those problems, Brian. It’s a terrible thing…”

His interlocutor, FOX News host Brian Kilmeade, is no stranger to eugenic ideas himself. In 2009 while discussing a study that showed married Swedes and Finns had lower rates of Alzheimer’s disease, he remarked, “We are—we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other...” adding, “See, the problem is the Swedes have pure genes. Because they marry other Swedes...Finns marry other Finns, so they have a pure society.” In 2025 he proposed involuntary lethal injection for mentally ill homeless people, essentially advocating for the Nazi’s Aktion T4 policy. None of these opinions cost him his job.

But the most obvious evidence comes from looking at the immigration crackdown itself. While initially stating that they were only going after “illegals,” and “criminals,” there has been a concerted effort to strip legal protections from immigrants and refugees who were formerly granted the right to be here legally; that is, to retroactively make them into illegals. The victims of these efforts are invariably black, brown or Muslim.

For example, the administration moved to end Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals, making Somalis noncitizens eligible for deportation. Haitians have been the targets of similar efforts, including being accused of eating cats and dogs—a longstanding racist trope. Of these efforts, Trump commented, “The situation in Minnesota reminds us that the West cannot mass import foreign cultures, which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own,” echoing white-supremacist rhetoric about immigration from nonwhite countries. They also moved to deport students who supported Palestinians. Meanwhile the welcome mat has been rolled out for South African Boers. According to the BBC, of 4,499 refugees admitted to the U.S. since October 2025, all but three were white South Africans. Trump has banned immigration from 75 countries, mostly in Africa, South America and the Middle East/North Africa, with virtually none of them European countries. It’s pretty hard not to see racism behind these actions.

This continues today, as videos of crimes committed by immigrants (but not citizens) are shared on official government Web sites—the more lurid and horrific the better. This recalls the racist propaganda purveyed by the Third Reich wherein Jews and Gypsies were depicted as criminally insane “degenerate” Untermenschen who were menaces to society. It was, they argued, “in their genes.” Is this really immigration enforcement, or is it ethnic cleansing?

We’ve already seen how ICE seems to be deliberately recruiting from white nationalist web sites and forums. It’s been noted by several media outlets that a lot of social media posts by the Trump administration seem to echo white nationalist—and even Nazi—rhetoric and imagery:

• An ICE recruitment post on Homeland Security’s X account on August 2025 asked, “Which way, American man?” referencing the book “Which Way Western Man?” by William Gayley Simpson, described above. This was not an isolated incident. A later post on the official White House account was titled “Which way Greenland Man?” during the period when Trump was threatening to invade and annex the territory of Greenland.

  

• The Department of Labor posted a video captioned “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage” echoing the Nazi slogan, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer,” (One People, One Nation, One Leader). Another tweet from the Department of Labor announced that “America is for Americans,” which sounds an awful lot like another infamous Nazi slogan: “Deutschland den Deutschen” (Germany for the Germans).

• The White House and the Department of Homeland Security jointly posted a recruitment ad for Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Instagram, Facebook and X, overlaid with the words “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN.” That’s also the name of a song written by Mannerbund, a far-right folk group that has been embraced by white-nationalist groups.

• On New Year’s Eve, 2025, the White House’s X account posted a photo of Trump alongside the word “remigration.” As noted above, remigration is a term commonly used by European identitarian movements as a euphemism for the expulsion of all nonwhite immigrants from Western countries, including naturalized citizens and their descendants. The Nazis also encouraged the Jews to voluntarily self-deport. When this proved insufficient, they turned to forced deportations and ghettos (and, ultimately, extermination).

• The Department of Homeland Security issued a press release titled “We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again,” in 2018. Many people pointed out that this phrasing was disturbingly similar to the so-called “14 Words,” a white nationalist slogan which states, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

• The US Department of Homeland Security shared on social media (without the artist’s permission) a painting entitled “A Prayer for a New Life” depicting a white frontier couple cradling a baby in a Conestoga wagon, adding the text, “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage.” DHS subsequently tweeted John Gast’s 1871 oil painting, American Progress, with the heading “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” Both posts capitalized the letter ‘H’ in the captions. Twin capitalized ‘H’s is a common trope in white supremacist circles for “Heil Hitler.” The imagery in both posts was blatantly nationalist, similar to Nazi propaganda with a nostalgic American bent.

  

• The Pentagon has posted several memes mimicking so-called “fashwave” aesthetics, including one of silhouetted Revolutionary War troops with glowing white eyes. DHS has shared several posts with similar aesthetics depicting ICE agents overlaid with VHS text and a glitchy filter. “Fashwave” has become a popular style of music and imagery among the far-right, co-opting the “vaporwave” aesthetics of the 1980s and repurposing it as a vehicle for pro-fascist messages. Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer, christened synthwave the “soundtrack of the alt-right.”

  

  

• In October 2025, the Department of Labor issued a series of posters on social media to promote Project Firewall, an effort to restrict the use of H1B visas and guarantee jobs to American workers. Users immediately recognized that the style of artwork was strikingly similar to the “Heroic Realism” style used by Nazi propaganda posters during World War Two. The AI-generated imagery featured uniformly young, blond men with hair styled unmistakably like the Hitler Youth.

  

• In November 2025, DHS posted a vintage car sitting on a beach in front of palm trees with the caption, “America After 100 Million Deportations.” That number was eyebrow-raising. Deporting all undocumented immigrants, green card holders, and evoking the citizenship of all naturalized citizens would only remove less than half that number. In other words, that number can only be achieved by removing tens of millions of American citizens. In an interview with the New York Times, sacked ICE chief Greg Bovino claimed that he had a “master plan” which allowed him to “neutralize” protestors and deport 100 million Americans.

Additionally, there is a disturbing trend of Republican politicians, high-ranking GOP members and many rank-and-file Republicans describing themselves as Nazis, praising Adolf Hitler, and denying—or even celebrating—the Holocaust.

• The Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina and gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson described himself as a “Black Nazi” and stated his preference for Adolf Hitler over Barack Obama. He also praised Mein Kampf, disparaged Martin Luther King Jr. as a “communist,” and stated his desire to own slaves. Robinson wrote, “this foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash.”

• In February 2025, it emerged that James Rodden, an ICE prosecutor in Texas, had been running a social media account praising Hitler and declaring that “America is a white nation.”

• Ed Martin, the pardon attorney at the Department of Justice, appeared at multiple events with January 6th rioter Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, referring to him as an “amazing guy”, “extraordinary leader”, and “great friend”. Hale-Cusanelli was described by federal prosecutors as a “Nazi sympathizer” who went to work at a Naval weapons station in a “Hitler mustache.” Hale-Cusanelli also recorded a lengthy antisemitic video rant in which he compared Orthodox Jews to a “plague of locusts.”

• Economist E.J. Antoni—referred to as “Trump’s favorite economist”—frequently used the German battleship Bismarck as his background art in TV interviews. The Bismarck’s launch was attended and celebrated by Adolf Hitler. On another occasion, Antoni wrote to a follower that the Bismarck was “hard not to love,” and engaged in friendly X conversations about German victimhood with far right pundit Candace Owens.

• Paul Ingrassia, the former White House liaison to the DHS now serving as acting general counsel at the General Services Administration, once allegedly declared in a group chat: “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.” In June 2024, Ingrassia was spotted at a rally in Detroit headlined by white nationalist Nick Fuentes. He has also stated that holidays commemorating African-Americans should be “eviscerated.” The top of Ingrassia’s Instagram page features a pinned photo of himself with Andrew Tate.

• Gavin Kliger, one of Elon Musk’s “doge bros,” wrote a Substack post where he cited Ron Unz’s post, “American Pravda,” as his inspiration to enter public service. Unz is long-time a supporter of eugenics, and his “American Pravda” essay includes comments denying the Holocaust, questioning 9/11, and engaging in anti-Black racism. Kliger often reposts content from the accounts of Musk, Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, and and demanded military tribunals and executions of undocumented migrants who commit crimes.

• Before becoming FBI director, Kash Patel appeared eight separate times on a podcast hosted by far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters, who promotes Holocaust denial. Peters posted a photo of himself holding Hitler’s Mein Kampf with the message “visionary leadership.” Ironically, Peters has called Indians “disgusting, parasitic people,” and accused them of “not assimilating into American culture” and gang raping women.

• Kingsley Wilson, the daughter of a right-wing commentator, was appointed the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary on Trump’s first day in office. In 2024 she tweeted, “The Great Replacement isn’t a right-wing conspiracy theory…it’s reality,” over a screenshot of a Bloomberg article about the growth of the U.S. Hispanic population. She has also repeatedly tweeted the phrase “Ausländer Raus” at least four times, including the slogan, “Deutschland den Deutschen. Ausländer raus.” She has promoted debunked lies about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched in 1915, claiming he was guilty of the murder for which most historians agree he was wrongly convicted. This case is widely known in white supremacist circles.

• In 2025, Politico published leaked transcripts of a Telegram chat of “young Republicans” (that is, under 40), who referred to Black people as monkeys and “watermelon people,” mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers, talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide, and lauded Republicans whom they assumed supported reinstating slavery.

• This was not an isolated incident. In WhatsApp conversations leaked to the Miami Herald, participants in a group chat for young Republicans “used variations of the n-word more than 400 times, regularly described women as ‘whores,’ used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics.”

• The Guardian reported that hacked emails showed that multiple applicants to the Heritage Foundation cited Carl Schmitt as their primary legal influence. Schmitt has been called “the crown jurist of the Third Reich” and was the developer of the legal theories which underpinned Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship. Schmitt characterized the Nuremberg Laws as the ‘constitution of freedom’ and organized an antisemitic conference ‘The Jewry in Legal Science’ in October 1936.3 In 2024, J.D. Vance described Schmitt’s ideas as, “There’s no law, there’s just power.”

• Jeremy Carl, a Trump nominee to become the Assistant Secretary of State for the United Nations, has claimed that white culture is being “erased,” that feminism has led to the downfall of society, that the United States should be a white Christian nation, and that whites are the most discriminated-against group in the USA.

• According to CNN: Over the past year, a trio of House Republicans have said “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” labeled Muslim congresswomen “terrorists,” expressed a preference for dogs over Muslims, told now-New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to “go back to the Third World” because he ate rice with his hands, and said that Muslims “breed their way through our society.”...The trio here—Reps. Randy Fine of Florida, Brandon Gill of Texas and Andy Ogles of Tennessee—have spoken in unvarnished and bigoted terms about Muslims.

• According to Marine Corps general John Kelly, who worked inside the White House from 2017 to 2019, Trump claimed that Hitler had “done some good things,” and that he wanted the same type of generals that Hitler had. Kelly also said that Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure,” defining fascism as, “a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader.” According to his former wife Ivana, Trump kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside.

• Trump’s vice president, J.D. Vance, is know to follow several white nationalists online, many of whom promote the Great Replacement Theory.

• The capstone of Trump’s 2024 campaign was a rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where 20,000 Americans rallied in support of the rise of Nazism in 1939. The even featured racist and dehumanizing remarks, including one of his bro comic supporters referring to Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

Trump’s 2024 campaign was endorsed by David Duke, Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, Andrew Anglin (editor of the Daily Stormer), Christopher Poulhaus (the founder of Blood Tribe), Don Black (founder of Stormfront), and many other prominent white nationalists and Neo-Nazis.

And then there’s Elon Musk. The South African immigrant is Trump’s most fervent billionaire supporter. Musk has called white people a “rapidly dying minority,” and “posted about how the white race was under threat, made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January [2026]” according to an analysis by The Guardian. Musk has also asserted on ‘X’ that white people would be “slaughtered” by non-whites if they become a demographic minority signaling an escalation and intensification of his beliefs. “If you stripped Elon Musk’s name off these [posts] posts and showed them to me, I would think that this was a white supremacist,” Heidi Beirich, cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Guardian after reviewing a selection of Musk’s tweets.

Musk often retweets posts from various white supremacists and neo-Nazis, including multiple references to the “Great Replacement” theory. Musk has frequently promoted conspiracy theories about George Soros, claiming that Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization,” and that he “hates humanity,” comparing him to the Jewish supervillain Magneto. After an “anti-woke” update, Musk’s AI chatbot referred to itself as “MechaHitler” and posted common antisemitic tropes before being abruptly taken down for “maintenance.” Musk’s Grokipedia cited a Neo-Nazi web site 42 times according to researchers. At a campaign rally, Musk told Germany’s far-right AfD party: “There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” Musk commonly refers to his critics as “traitors,” without specifying what they are traitors to. And, of course, there is the incident at the presidential inauguration captured in the photo above which the whole world witnessed first-hand.

So just because antisemitism specifically is not an official stance of the GOP, I think there’s plenty of evidence that racism and white supremacy are inherently a part of MAGA’s world view and the Trump administration’s political style and approach to governing. And antisemitism is arguably used by the GOP as well:

• Trump’s final campaign commercial in 2016 featured grainy images of George Soros, Janet Yellen, then the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve; and Lloyd Blankfein, then the chairman of Goldman Sachs—all of them Jewish—as Mr. Trump warned darkly about the “global special interests.” Also in 2016, Trump posted an image showing the Star of David with the words “most corrupt candidate ever” written on it, juxtaposed with the face of Hillary Clinton in front of a pile of money.

• Both “Great Replacement” and George Soros conspiracy theories are extremely popular among today’s far-right, and both are common antisemitic tropes. The Southern Poverty Law Center writes, “The ‘great replacement’ theory is inherently white supremacist. It depends on stoking fears that a non-white population, which the theory’s proponents characterize as ‘inferior,’ will displace a white majority. It is also antisemitic. Some proponents of the ‘great replacement’ do not explicitly attribute the plot to Jews. Instead, they blame powerful Jewish individuals such as financier and philanthropist George Soros or use coded antisemitic language to identify shadowy ‘elites’ or ‘globalists.’” Note that the SPLC has recently been indicted by the Trump administration.

• Colorado GOP gubernatorial candidate Joe Oltmann claimed that a group of Jewish people he calls the “Synagogue of Satan” run Colorado and, more broadly, control the world. Oltmann has said that the Jewish “cartel” is running Colorado and wants to “enslave” people as they enrich themselves.

• Jeremy Carl, the Trump nominee from Montana questioned in the video above, has stated that, “Jews have loved to play the victim. The Holocaust dominates so much of modern Jewish history. Jews love to see themselves as oppressed.”

• This past January, 2026, a New Hampshire state legislator, Matt Sabourin dit Choinièr, teamed up with a German Holocaust denier named Gemar Rudolf4 to propose that the state’s public schools incorporate Holocaust denial into their curriculum. On April 14, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Sabourin dit Choinière posted a photo of himself presenting the amendment on Facebook. He added the caption, “ahead of our time.”

• CNN reported that the son-in-law of Republican Senate candidate Mike Collins is a white nationalist social media influencer. David Alan Scheer II posted antisemitic conspiracy theories and Nazi imagery and claimed that white people were going extinct in the US, adding that “clearing our land of other people” would be necessary to “restore community.” Scheer is a part of his father-in-law’s campaign, appearing in photos and attending his primary victory party.

In late 2022, Nick Fuentes—an avowed white nationalist and antisemite —dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate along with Kanye (“Ye”) West. The following month, West (who was running for President at the time) declared his love for Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust, claiming that it was “factually incorrect” that Hitler killed six million Jews. As recently as 2025, West stated, “I love Hitler” and “I’m a Nazi,” and offered T-shirts for sale on his Web site featuring swastikas. In May 2025, he released a track entitled “Heil Hitler” featuring audio from one of Hitler’s speeches. The fact that West (like Mark Robinson and Candace Owens) is African-American and Fuentes is of Irish, Italian and Mexican descent, is proof of just how malleable and “inclusive” white identity has become in modern-day America. Consider it a DEI policy for fascism5.

Another example is Trump’s most fanatical lieutenant, Stephen N. Miller, a descendant of Ashkenazic Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. In 2019, a former staffer of the right-wing media outlet Breitbart released emails between herself and Miller in which Miller told her to push anti-immigration narratives and made references to the novel, “The Camp of the Saints,” described above. Miller frequently makes posts on his social media saying things like, “If you import the Third World, you become the Third World,” clearly indicating that he believes in “essentialist” theories of race. In offhand remarks in the Oval Office, Trump stated that “if it was up to Miller there would be only 100 million people in this country, and they would all look like him.”

In the emails, Miller, an adviser to the Trump campaign at the time, advocated many of the most extreme white supremacist concepts. These included the “great replacement” theory, fears of white genocide through immigration, race science, and eugenics; he also linked immigrants with crime, glorified the Confederacy, and promoted the genocidal book, The Camp of the Saints, as a roadmap for U.S. policy. Anti-Semitism was the only missing white nationalist trope in the emails—perhaps unsurprisingly, as Miller himself is Jewish.

How White Supremacy Returned to Mainstream Politics (American Prospect)

Miller is preoccupied with the 1924 Immigration Act which severely restricted immigration to the U.S. from certain parts of the world and regularly describes immigration as an “invasion.” At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, Miller gave a eulogy with rhetoric that sounded uncannily similar to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s 1932 speech “The Storm is Coming.” Even the normally skeptical debunking website Snopes could not help but note the striking “similarities” between Miller’s and Goebbels’s speeches.

The UnPopulist

The Dark Ideology Behind Stephen Miller's Immigration Crusade: Part II

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9 months ago · 108 likes · 13 comments · Greg Sargent

Some people cite the administration’s unconditional support of Israel as proof that the administration cannot be antisemitic, and therefore cannot be compared to the Nazis. But I would argue that Nazi Germany would have actually supported the state of Israel had it existed at the time.

This may seem outrageous, but consider that the Nazi’s issue with the Jews was their presence on German soil. If the Jews were expelled, on the other hand, they would no longer be a problem. This is proven by the fact that the first plans to get rid of the Jews were via mass expulsion rather than extermination, for example, the Madagascar Plan. Sending the Jews to Palestine was not possible at this time due to Palestine being under the British control. The Nazis would have had no problem with Jewish separatism; in fact, they would have preferred it as they opposed race-mixing. In fact, many Jews at the time did leave Germany and settle in Palestine due to Nazi persecution.

Furthermore, the actions of the present-day state of Israel are entirely consistent with the Nazi world view. The Nazis believed in a bitter Darwinian struggle between races. Furthermore, they believed in a hierarchy of races. If a “lesser” race like the Arabs were subjugated by the Jews, then so be it. And they certainly didn’t have a problem with war, murder and genocide. While the Nazis believed Aryans were superior to Jews, if Jews were superior to Arabs, then domination would be the “natural” order of things according to them. Critics of Israel have, in fact, made analogies between Nazism and Zionism. Both movements are rooted in ultranationalism and the notion of a “special, chosen people,” and both feature hierarchy and the subjugation of others.

Therefore, I argue that there is no inherent contradiction between the Trump administration’s support for Israel and its white supremacy. In fact, quite the opposite—it is wholly consistent with it—just with a different set of racial categories. So just because antisemitism is not an official stance of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, I think there’s plenty of evidence that the core philosophy articulated above is inherently a part of their world view and the Trump administration’s approach to governing. And, as we’ve seen, there is still plenty of hidden—and not so hidden—antisemitism on the far-right.

The other elephant in the room is concentration camps. Many people instinctively object to making an analogy between the vast, diffuse and expanding incarceration apparatus in the United States and the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. And it’s certainly true that, at this time, there is nothing like the horrific death camps that eventually emerged. But neither did those camps begin as death camps. Rather, they began as places to house “legitimate” enemies of the state in accordance with the laws at the time. The most brutal and notorious Nazi prisons like Auschwitz were built outside of Germany in occupied territories, much the same way as the U.S. government’s worst torture prisons tend to be located abroad in places like Cuba, El Salvador, and Sudan.

And the death toll inside the rapidly expanding detention centers across the country is rising precipitously. Recently, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights has raised the alarm internationally about the deaths of immigrants in US government custody, and has called for “prompt, independent, impartial and effective investigations.” That’s right, the United Nations is sounding the alarm over concentration camp deaths in the United States of America.

Blood and Soil Ideology

Traditionally, the United States has been seen as a place where anyone could come and build a life for themselves if they adhered to the laws and believed in the ideals of the Constitution. This was articulated, for example, by Emma Lazarus’s famous poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty welcoming the wretched, the homeless, and the “tempest-tost.” Unlike the Old World, America was not a nation defined by blood or race, and no citizen could be seen as “more” American than any other regardless of their country of origin or how long their ancestors had lived here. There were no “tiers” of Americans—rather, all citizens were created equal as the Declaration of Independence proclaimed. As Republican Senator John McCain stated in his farewell address, “We are citizens of the world’s greatest republic. A nation of ideals, not blood and soil.”

The MAGA movement, by contrast, rejects this vision of the United States. Instead, they see America as a specific place for certain kinds of people, with outsiders unable to fully integrate or ever become truly American. They believe that immigrants from overseas somehow degrade or compromise the nation’s integrity. In place of the traditional “melting pot,” they instead desire a culturally homogeneous ethnostate. They have adopted the term “Heritage American” to describe those whom they consider to be “real” Americans, with a special emphasis on Protestant Scots-Irish migrants to Appalachia and those whose ancestors fought in the U.S. Civil War. For MAGA, only certain, select Americans can ever be considered “real” Americans, in contrast with the vision of the nation’s founders.

One of the difficulties for National Conservatism is that the founding documents of the United States are based upon the ideals of the Enlightenment. However, fascism is explicitly opposed to the Enlightenment. As a result, in place of these “outdated” notions, National Conservatism instead calls for a more “organic,” ethnically-based definition of American citizenship based on blood and soil (Blut Und Boden), similar to identitarian movements in Europe, Russia, and the philosophy of the Third Reich.

As demonstrated above, today’s right-wing propaganda obsessively repeats phrases such as “People,” “Homeland,” and “Heritage” similar to Nazi propaganda (which used similar phrases in German such as “Volk” and “Heimat”). This has been most forcefully articulated by J.D. Vance. Historian Heather Cox-Richardson writes:

“Blood and soil” ideology claimed true Germans were defined by race within a specific land. Nazi propagandist Richard Walther Darré reflected those ideas when he celebrated agricultural life and what he claimed were rural values. Elevating those who had lived in Germany for generations, he suggested that German blood was mystically connected to German soil. “[T]he German soul with its warmth is rooted in its agriculture and in a real sense always grew out of it,” Darré wrote. To maintain that soul, he wrote, Germany needed to preserve racial purity and reject foreign blood. To that end, it needed to protect pure marriages and encourage the right people to have lots of children: the main job of a wife was to produce children. Unless the country took drastic measures, he wrote, the German “race” might become extinct.

The details of the “blood and soil” ideology might not be clear to MAGA today, but its adherents definitely get the concept: at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, white nationalists shouted, “Blood and soil.”

Those ideas are now advanced by MAGA leadership. On July 5, 2025, Vice President J.D. Vance told an audience at the Claremont Institute he rejected the idea that being an American simply meant agreeing with the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. He complained not only that such a definition would include too many people, but also that it would exclude those who disagreed with it, even if their ancestors had fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he said.

He continued: “I believe one of the most pressing problems for us to face as statesmen is to redefine the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century.” America, he said, “is not just an idea, we’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”

Vance’s invocation of the burial plots of his ancestors is consistent with this ultranationalist, blood-and-soil ideology, and could come directly out of Nazi propaganda. It is also remarkably ironic, given that the working-class Scots-Irish immigrants he touts as the “real Americans” only arrived on the continent a few centuries ago and proceeded to kill, enslave, or herd onto reservations the people whose ancestors had lived on these lands for countless thousands of years.

A Cult of Martyrdom

We’ve talked about the cult of martyrdom before. In Nazi Germany, people who died for the cause were elevated to heroes. Since fascism relies on the “mobilizing passions” rather than any consistent political program or ideology, there is no better way of stirring the passions than matters of life and death. For people with a romantic view of life and few prospects for advancement, the idea of becoming a hero by dying for a cause appeals to a certain kind of person, especially the frustrated young men who form the vanguard of all fascist movements.

The primary example of this was Horst Wessel, a Brownshirt paramilitary who was killed by Communists in 1930. Wessel’s death became a cause célèbre by the German far right and his funeral became something a major event in Germany with many high-ranking Nazi leaders attending. He subsequently became a martyr for the Nazi cause whose name was constantly evoked. The “Horst Wessel Song” became the official anthem of the Nazi Party and the unofficial anthem of Germany when the Nazis gained power. In January 1933, at the dedication for a memorial to Wessel, Hitler declared Wessel a “blood witness” whose song had become, “a battle hymn for millions.” He added that Wessel’s sacrifice of his life was “a monument more lasting than stone and bronze.”

We’ve previously mentioned Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who shot and killed two people during public disturbances in Kenosha, Wisconsin and subsequently became a hero for the far right. But a better example are the rioters who stormed the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 resulting in the deaths of one protestor and several officers.

The “January Sixthers” subsequently became martyrs to the cause, and to be a “Sixther” is seen as badge of honor among the MAGA faithful, analogous to those who participated in Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1924. They were repeatedly portrayed as “political prisoners” unjustly persecuted by a biased system in the right-wing media. While in prison, the “January 6 Choir” recorded an album called “Justice for All” which was played at Trump rallies, similar to the playing of the Horst Wessel song at Nazi rallies. Trump unconditionally pardoned all of the rioters on his first day in office, with several of them going on to commit further crimes including child sexual abuse.

An even more dramatic example is provided by right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk’s death. Kirk’s murder was a shocking and cold-blooded act of political violence and was justly condemned by people across the political spectrum. While his death was a tragedy, the subsequent reaction and witch hunts created a pervasive atmosphere of fear and trepidation. Many people lost their jobs, suddenly attacked by a party that had spent years proclaiming itself to be the sole defender of “free speech.” Even directly quoting Kirk’s own words and opinions carried the threat of retaliation. Any way that Kirk’s death could be used to crack down on the administration’s perceived enemies was realized, as the Jimmy Kimmel affair illustrated. Even though there was no evidence that it was anything other than a lone gunman, Trump declared, “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.” Kirk’s unsavory opinions were whitewashed and hagiographies abounded. Comparisons were made by historians to the murder of Nazi diplomat Ernst von Rath by Polish-Jewish expatriate Herschel Grynszpan which was used as a pretext to launch Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom of November 9–10, 1938.

“We are Charlie Kirk” became a rallying cry for the far right. An AI-generated song “We Are Charlie Kirk” became one of the first AI works to ever list on Billboard and Spotify’s viral song charts. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and flags were flown at half-staff around the country for a week. Kirk’s body was flown from Utah to Arizona on Air Force Two, the Vice President’s own personal plane, with the Vice President as one of the pallbearers. His funeral was attended by several members of the administration, becoming a right-wing political rally in the process, similar to Wessel’s funeral in Berlin. In his “The Storm is Coming” speech described above, Stephen Miller declared, “You thought you had killed Charlie Kirk? You have immortalized him! And now millions will carry on his legacy!” Not to be outdone, FBI Director Kash Patel channeled German paganism directly, ending his speech with, “To my friend Charlie Kirk—rest now, brother. We have the watch, and I will see you in Valhalla.” Statues of Kirk have been proposed for Florida, Oklahoma, and Washington D.C, among other places, and streets have been renamed in his honor. In March 2026, the Department of Education hung banners honoring Booker T. Washington, Catharine Beecher, and Charlie Kirk as “American heroes.”

Only a few weeks before Kirk’s death, two Democratic politicians were gunned down in their homes by a right-wing vigilante posing as a policeman without much further ado.

War Crimes

We’ll close by mentioning a new disturbing trend. Some of the most shocking incidents of violence during World War Two were committed by German paramilitaries behind enemy lines, especially the Einsatzgruppen in the Eastern Front who were part of the SS.

Despite all its military engagements and warmongering, the United States has always portrayed itself as the “good guys” by following international laws and conventions. We hung the Nazis at Nuremberg, after all, and brought Imperial Japan to heel. As John McCain said in his speech noted above, “We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history.” Although often hypocritical, as the saying goes, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

But the current regime seems to have abandoned even the pretense of being the “good guys,” or following international laws and norms. Rather, it seems to revel in the rhetoric of bloodshed and gratuitous violence (i.e. “war porn”). This ruthless, lawless, “shoot first and ask questions later,” approach to warfare and indifference to civilian casualties seems awfully similar to the methodology of the Third Reich, and stands in stark contrast with how American military leaders have traditionally conducted themselves in the past.

Earlier, we showed an image of the former head of DHS, Kristi Noem, standing in front of a podium which read, “One of Ours, All of Yours.” At the time, this was incorrectly identified as a Nazi slogan; however, it was noted by many historians that collective punishment was a tactic frequently employed by the Nazis. This was exemplified by the Lidice massacre, which was committed by German occupation forces in the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in response to the assassination of the deputy governor of the province, Reinhard Heydrich, in 1942. The suspicion that the assassins had been given shelter by the Czech village of Lidice led to the execution of all male villagers aged 15 and up by German authorities, with female villagers and underage boys shipped to concentration camps and the village razed to the ground.

As this example shows, what distinguished the Nazi approach to war were things like the random murder of civilians, disdain for the rules of combat, and a willingness to commit war crimes without fear of reprisal or punishment. The horror caused by these sorts of atrocities is what prompted militaries around the world to institute rules restricting the application of force to the theater of combat and minimize civilian casualties.

Pete Hegseth, the former weekend TV news host and self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” who was given command of the U.S. military, has long shown disdain for these rules, which he sees as unnecessary limitations. He has defended soldiers accused of war crimes such as Clint Lorance, who ordered his unit to fire on unarmed civilians in Afghanistan, and Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who stabbed and killed an injured 17-year-old Iraqi, both of whom have been pardoned by the President, along with other accused war criminals. The Secretary seems to take a perverse delight in the aesthetics and rhetoric of war for its own sake rather than as means to an objective.

Hegseth, who refers to U.S. soldiers as “warriors” and “warfighters,” has stated that the focus of the U.S. military is “Lethality, lethality, lethality” (rather than, say, victory). “[A]cademic rules of engagement…have been tying the hands of our warfighters for too long,” he wrote in his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors.” There is already evidence of war crimes committed under his watch, including a “double tap” strike on a shipwrecked boat in the Caribbean, and the Minab Girl’s School attack in Iran. Here, too, there seems to be an undercurrent of racism as Hegseth—a lowly major—has personally intervened to block the promotions of black and female service members despite their service record and qualifications, and has disproportionately targeted such service members for dismissal.

At the outset of the Iran conflict, Hegseth declared, “The dumb, politically correct wars of the past were the opposite of what we’re doing here. They had vague objectives with restrictive, minimalist rules of engagement. No more.” Alarm was raised when he declared that ”no quarter” would be given to enemy combatants. “No quarter” is a legal term with a specific meaning in warfare. Offering “no quarter” to an enemy under this definition is tantamount to a war crime. “The only ones who should be worried right now are Iranians who think they’re going to live,” he boasted. Hegseth’s regular worship services at the Pentagon and appeals to God’s favor evoke the phrase inscribed on the belt buckles of Wehrmacht uniforms, “Gott Mit Uns” (God is with us). Hegseth is a fervent Christian Nationalist adorned with Crusader tattoos who is under the sway of radical evangelist preacher Douglas Wilson. There is evidence that some inside the Pentagon see the conflict with Iran as a kind of “holy war.”

More recently, the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has launched a campaign against the International Criminal Court, the sole institution that holds war criminals accountable for international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggressive war. The United States is already not one of the 125 member states, nonetheless the United States has launched an aggressive campaign to “dismantle” the institution, including pressure against member states. “Using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary,” said Rubio.

Then there is the President himself. Trump proclaimed that he would have “honor” to be the one to “take” Cuba. “Whether I free it, take it, I can do anything I want with it,” Trump stated matter-of-factly. He claimed he would bomb Iran’s Kharg Island “just for fun.” On April 1, 2026, Trump delivered a prime time address threatening to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.” He threatened to blow up civilian infrastructure like power plants and desalinization facilities in Iran—a clear and obvious war crime under international law. His rhetoric has ramped up to genocidal levels, proclaiming, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Not even Adolf Hitler’s speeches were this bloodthirsty and unhinged, and not even Hitler or Mussolini were megalomaniacal enough to portray themselves as Jesus Christ himself.

I’ll end it here for length, but I could easily write a dozen more posts exactly like this filled with even more examples. Hopefully this is sufficient enough to persuade.

So that’s why they are fascists. And, yes, they are Nazis.

5. An unaccountable private army.

One of the most distinct and notorious features of fascist regimes is the creation of a national paramilitary force and secret police to go after political opponents and keep the population in line. A secret police has the following characteristics:

• It is a political police force, denoting that it targets political opponents and dissidents to preserve the status quo;

• It is not controlled by other security agencies and answers directly to the authoritarian leadership;

• The identity of its members and its operations are secret;

• It is an internal security organization that specializes in political intelligence and surveillance operations;

• It carries out violent policing practices such as arbitrary searches, arrests, interrogations, torture, indefinite detention, and disappearances.

A secret police can therefore be defined as: A police force that targets political enemies to protect the regime in power, is controlled by the regime in power, has its identities and operation kept secret, spies on its own countrymen, and uses violent policing to further its goals of keeping the regime in power.

The definition above is taken from this video, which explains why ICE is so problematic as an organization:

As the video outlines, the danger with immigration enforcement is that it occupies a gray area in the legal system which makes it the ideal Trojan Horse for the creation a repressive secret police force, as many—including myself—have been warning. The creation of a class of “stateless” people who are denied fundamental rights and legal protections is the perfect pretext to enforce state terror and was, in fact, the exact same strategy the Nazis used against the Jewish population.

According to the video, courts have repeatedly granted the U.S. government plenary power—that is, absolute power—to enforce immigration laws. The only other plenary powers are war powers, foreign affairs, Indian Affairs, and authority over U.S. territories, all of which are outwardly facing or narrow in scope.

This means that immigration as a field of law is placed largely outside the judicial scrutiny applied to other types of domestic law enforcement. Immigration cases are prosecuted through the civil justice system, not the criminal justice system, allowing the bypassing of procedural safeguards which typically accompany criminal policing such as indictments, jury trials, proof beyond a reasonable doubt and judicial oversight. Immigration law itself is complex and opaque, and even many lawyers do not understand it fully. As the video notes, “There is nothing like immigration law as a field, where there is so much power involving so much of the population concentrated in a virtually unchecked judicial environment.”

Furthermore, over the years Congress has passed laws which have delegated much of its authority over immigration to the executive branch. In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, immigration enforcement became integrated with intelligence and counterterrorism in a vast new bureaucracy. The Department of Homeland Security combined twenty-two separate agencies under a single cabinet-level department. ICE was created in 2003 as a civil agency with nationwide authority to enforce immigration, not to catch criminals. The video states,

“What ICE represented was something completely new in American governance—a civil enforcement agency with nationwide reach, broad discretionary authority, operating outside the criminal justice system, under direct executive control.

It was all of the worst fears of the framers [of the U.S. Constitution] put together: a federal, domestically oriented, civil police force, not accountable to state governments, given unprecedented leeway to act by Congress and the courts, under the exclusive control of the President.”

Because immigration enforcement is administrative rather than criminal, the safeguards put in place to protect citizens from arbitrary arrest and detention are not present. For this reason, ICE operates effectively outside the normal boundaries of law, transparency and accountability. Once detained, people are denied even the minimal protections theoretically available to them in the criminal legal incarceration system such as the right to government-appointed counsel and defined lengths of incarceration. Due to “Kavanaugh stops,” ICE agents are allowed to engage in racial profiling and stop and harass people based on simply their appearance or manner of speaking. More recently, ICE has used so-called “administrative warrants,” rather than judicial warrants signed by a judge, to conduct searches and seizures in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Allies of the president have called for ICE agents to be deployed to several states to monitor polling stations for alleged “voter fraud” (about which, more below). The recent deployment of ICE to airports—recall they’re theoretically for domestic immigration enforcement—indicates that they have already transformed into the President’s all-purpose personal fix-it force.

As the video notes, “Abolishing ICE doesn’t mean abolishing immigration enforcement. It means abolishing an institution whose very structure is an exception in the American legal system, a structure that makes abuse not only possible, but likely.” Not only are the safeguards against abuse by ICE not being strengthened, they are intentionally being removed:

The Trump administration has so radically transformed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) independent watchdog teams that thousands of cases related to conditions in immigration detention, deaths in custody and officers’ use of force are not being investigated…

Hundreds of pages of court filings in a key legal battle in federal court serve to contradict the Trump administration’s repeated claims that the DHS watchdogs are performing “all required functions”. The allegations of failings within the shrunken oversight offices at the DHS, tasked by Congress with investigating civil rights and related concerns, come as the department grapples with public criticism of killings by immigration agents, escalating arrest tactics and plans to increase immigrant detention.

Court records reveal gutting of DHS oversight: ‘Incredibly dangerous’ (The Guardian)

Rather than simply “enforcing the law,” the Department of Justice has repeatedly been found in contempt for violating court orders. Courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally. According to documents filed by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, ICE has been lying for a year about being authorized to make arrests at immigration courts. Detainees are moved around in a shell game designed to keep them out of the reach of the courts. Legal procedures such as due process and habeas corpus are routinely violated—something we see in fragile states rather than established democracies theoretically bound by the rule of law. Immigration courts are being overwhelmed and abuse is rife. There are a quarter fewer immigration judges than there were a decade ago, largely by design. As agents grind toward their government-mandated quotas, one DOJ lawyer asked to be held in contempt so she could get a good night’s sleep.

While the initial rhetoric claimed that ICE would be exclusively going after “the worst of the worst,” an analysis found that 77 percent of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal convictions. The government’s own Web sites depicting so-called “hardened criminals” being detained by ICE have been found to be full of lies and exaggerations. Not only are illegal immigrants with otherwise clean records targeted, so are asylum seekers, legal immigrants, and those who are retroactively made illegal due to a concerted effort to strip protections from people who were previously accorded the right to be in the country legally by the courts. As the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia demonstrated, even having the legal right to be here did not offer protection from being sent to an overseas torture prison. The administration has sought to strip temporary legal status from several groups, including Somalis, Haitians and Syrians. Detainees included a four-year-old with Stage 4 cancer (who was sent home without her medication), and a seven year old Canadian girl with autism and her mother.

Less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump’s 1st year back in office had violent criminal records, document shows (CBS News)

Even more troubling has been the arrest and detention of American citizens:

During the second presidency of Donald Trump, federal immigration enforcement policies and operations have resulted in the documented arrest, death, detention, and removal of American citizens. As of October 2025, the U.S. government was not tracking the number of detained or missing citizens, but ProPublica confirmed at least 170 citizen detentions by that time. The deportation of U.S. citizens from the United States is illegal.

High-profile detention cases of American citizens include arrests of elected officials, disabled adults and children, and Puerto Rican and Indigenous people. Donald Trump has supported taking away citizenship from Americans and detaining citizens in foreign prisons noted for human rights abuses…

Deaths, detentions and deportations of American citizens in the second Trump administration (Wikipedia)

According to The Wall Street Journal, “Americans Are Now a Target in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown.”

The Wall Street Journal found that the Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002 to protect Americans, has turned its force against citizens. Of the 279 people accused by officials on X of attacking federal officers in the past year, 181 were U.S. citizens, the Journal found. Close to half of those Americans were never charged with assault. None have been convicted at trial.

Yet names, mug shots and other identifying details posted by the government put a bull’s-eye on them. They had to explain the accusations to family, friends and employers. In a few cases, their home and workplace addresses were leaked online, drawing death threats.

Masked and armed agents seizing random people off the streets, breaking down the doors of private homes, and throwing people into unmarked vans, is something we expect to see in totalitarian dictatorships not hypothetical democracies like the United States. It is reminiscent of historical fascist dictatorships. ICE agents are masked and anonymous, and their identities are kept secret for alleged fear of “doxxing,” unlike regular law enforcement officers who are required to display names and badges. They have arrested journalists and opposition politicians—a clear case of going after enemies of the regime. And they have engaged in domestic spying on American citizens. We have seen ICE compiling a database of protestors, using facial recognition scanners, accessing sensitive government data like Medicaid and IRS data, and using cell phones to track American citizens. Some of this software has been developed by Palantir. Agents are even taking samples of people's DNA. This video by investigative journalist Taylor Lorenz discusses just some of the tools routinely being used by ICE:

A massive and unaccountable surveillance state is being constructed in the United States under the guise of “immigration enforcement, and you would be a fool to think it will be all dismantled once the immigrants are gone. This was the true purpose of the immigration crackdown. Republicans are cheering their own enslavement.

‘We know you live right here’: No secrets in America’s new surveillance dragnet (MSN)

ICE acknowledges it is using powerful spyware (NPR)

Thus we see all of the hallmarks of a secret police listed above. In Nazi Germany, the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) were the secret state police, a branch of the state’s policing system. Like ICE, they operated without judicial oversight, allowing them to detain, interrogate, and torture individuals arbitrarily. The Gestapo was allowed to send people to detention camps without trial. The S.A., or Brownshirts, began as a paramilitary unit of the National Socialist Party (much the same as the Proud Boys or Patriot Front today), and were eventually superseded and incorporated into the Schutzstaffel (SS), which began as Hitler’s personal bodyguard. Eventually, all policing operations were overseen by the SS and combined into the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) to centralize Nazi security operations, similar to the centralization of policing and internal security under DHS.

In January 2026, the President threatened Minnesota with a “DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION”—something you would expect to come from a foreign adversary or terrorist (or perhaps a Supervillian), and not your own nation’s chief executive. The assault on the citizens of Minneapolis was staggering. ICE agents outnumbered police officers by a 2:1 ratio. Incidents of deadly force by ICE against American citizens were not investigated, and local authorities were repeatedly blocked and prohibited from conducting their own investigations of these incidents. Justice department officials were ordered to go after the victims’ families instead, and the victims were slandered by federal officials as “paid agitators” and “domestic terrorists” without evidence. Officers who shot and killed Americans were not reprimanded and have suffered no penalty, essentially giving a tacit green light to conduct state-sanctioned executions. Citizens cowered in their homes, businesses shut their doors, and students were whisked from school as soon as the day ended.

While the whole nation witnessed the cold-blooded executions by ICE of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti with their own eyes, they were not the only victims. In Texas, Ruben Ray Martiniez was killed months earlier. Recently, the death of a nearly blind Myanmar refugee abandoned in a Buffalo doughnut shop by ICE was ruled a homicide. In every instance video and eyewitness evidence directly contradicted the testimony of ICE officers:

In six violent encounters, evidence contradicts Trump immigration officials’ narratives (Reuters)

DHS keeps making false claims about people. It’s part of a broader pattern (NPR)

The many claims by Trump’s DHS that have fallen apart (CNN)

ICE is currently planning to recruit up to 40,000+ officers—a veritable domestic army. Its budget is greater than all other law enforcing agencies combined, and larger even than the U.S. Marine Corps, which is currently engaged in a war overseas. Recruits are given lavish bonuses and student loan forgiveness. According to a whistleblower, the the agency’s training program for new recruits is “deficient, defective and broken.” Many trainees cannot pass even the most basic physical and mental tests. Most concernedly, there seems to be a deliberate attempt to recruit from white nationalist rallies and websites.

The scale of detention is also breathtaking. As of 2026, ICE is operating over 225 detention centers around the country and has around 73,000 people in custody—the highest since the agency’s founding in 2003. ICE is currently planning to spend 38 billion dollars building a vast network of holding centers by buying up warehouses across the country, often paying inflated prices for them. Given that the government can shuttle illegal immigrants out of the country fairly quickly, the need for such vast detention centers is highly suspicious. Many of these prisons are privately owned and operated for profit. Agreements have been made with foreign governments to send prisoners overseas including to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, Costa Rica, and South Sudan. According to a report by the ACLU, some of the conditions inside the detention centers include:

• Hazardous facilities and inhumane treatment

• Forced labor

• Inadequate sanitation

• Denial of health care

• Fear of retaliation

Given all of the above information, it’s not unreasonable to describe these as concentration camps, or even torture prisons. It’s important to remember that the first Nazi detention centers like Dachau—which opened only three months after the Nazis came to power—were not initially death camps. Instead they were for “legitimate” enemies of the state. It was not until much later toward the end of the war when these camps were retrofitted to the task of mass extermination. At least twenty-nine migrants had died in these facilities last year, and six in January this year, including a teenager. Historian Heather Cox Richardson has frequently defended the use of the term “concentration camps” when describing these facilities:

Richardson’s insistence on calling these facilities concentration camps is analytically exact. A concentration camp, in the historical sense, is not necessarily a death camp; it is a place where a state concentrates populations it considers threats or burdens, subjecting them to confinement, disease, abuse, and often death through neglect rather than industrialized extermination. By that definition, the sprawling network of ICE and Border Patrol detention centers, where people are warehoused for months to years, often in horrific conditions, qualifies.

New reporting details how this system is poised to scale up dramatically. An internal ICE memo, recently surfaced, outlines a $38 billion plan for a “new detention center model” that would, in one year, create capacity for roughly 92,600 people by purchasing eight “mega centers,” 16 processing centers, and 10 additional facilities. The largest of these warehouses would hold between 7,000 and 10,000 people each for average stays of about 60 days, more than double the size of the largest current federal prison. Separate reporting has mapped at least 23 industrial warehouses being surveyed for conversion into mass detention camps, with leases already secured at several sites.

Investigations by Amnesty International and others into prototype facilities have found detainees shackled in overcrowded cages, underfed, forced to use open‑air toilets that flood, and routinely denied medical care. Sexual assault and extortion by guards, negligent deaths, and at least one homicide have been documented. These are not accidents; they are predictable outcomes of a profit‑driven system where private contractors are paid per bed and oversight is weak, and of a political culture that dehumanizes migrants as “invaders” or “animals.”

Richardson highlights another crucial dimension: the way DHS has been retooled to project this violence into the interior as a form of political terror. Agents from ICE and Border Patrol, subdivisions of a relatively new department lacking the institutional restraints of the military, have been deployed in cities far from any border, often in unmarked vehicles, wearing masks and lacking visible identification. Secret legal memos under Trump gutted the traditional requirement of a judicial warrant for entering homes, replacing it with internal sign‑off by another DHS official, a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

This matters both instrumentally and symbolically. Instrumentally, it enables efficient mass raids and “snatch and grab” operations that bypass local law‑enforcement norms and judicial oversight. Symbolically, it communicates that the state reserves the right to operate as a lawless force, unconstrained by the very constitution it claims to defend. When masked, unidentified agents can seize people off the streets, shove them into unmarked vans, and deposit them in processing centers without due process, the aesthetic of fascism…thugs in the night…becomes reality...

America’s Oligarchic Techno‑Feudal Elite Are Attempting to Build a Twenty‑First‑Century Fascist State (Collapse of Industrial Civilization)

List of immigrant detention sites in the United States (Wikipedia)

In addition, Richardson also notes that the creation of such a large and lavishly funded carceral state creates perverse economic incentives to maintain, and even expand it. These centers provide an economic lifeline and jobs to people in rural communities. Even if every single immigrant in the country were removed, then what? Do we really expect that all of these detention centers will simply be closed and the tens of thousands of ICE agents and guards laid off? I doubt it. What will happen is that the police state apparatus will go after other targets, and those detention centers will be filled with someone else—perhaps the “enemy within?” According to the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), the government can now “disrupt” groups that “foment political violence” before they commit such acts. Indicators of violence include such things as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on gender,” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

Anti-ICE protesters accused of being part of antifa found guilty of support for terrorism in Texas (Politico)

6. Attacks on democratic elections

Elections are the most basic and fundamental hallmark of democratic societies. Elections hold the government accountable. Under a democracy, if citizens are unhappy or dissatisfied with those who are governing them, they can remove them and appoint new leaders. Without free and fair elections where the majority of eligible citizens can exercise their right to vote, a country can no longer be legitimately called a democracy.

Fascists hate elections because they fundamentally do not believe in democracy. One of the first things historical fascist regimes did was restrict or remove the right to vote. In Italy, Mussolini passed the Acerbo Law which stated that the party with the largest share of the votes would automatically receive two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, as long as they received over 25 percent of the vote. The 1924 Italian general election was the last multiparty election held in Italy until after World War Two. In the March 1933 German Federal Election, held just days after the Reichstag fire, the National Socialists received 43.9 percent of the vote, with the Brownshirts conducting widespread campaigns of voter intimidation. The Nazis claimed that 75 percent of 51 percent (the far-right coalition’s margin in the legislature) amounted to an outright majority. Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany weeks later, and in the months that followed all other parties were outlawed. This was the last federal election held in Germany until after the fall of the Third Reich in 1945.

Trump had previously attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election via the Fake Electors Plot, which was investigated by the Justice Department. According to sworn testimony by special counsel Jack Smith, he believed Trump was indeed guilty of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, but was forced to drop the charges when Trump was elected president a second time. Trump has continued to insist—against all evidence—that there is an epidemic of voter fraud and that the 2020 election was “stolen,” and a vast right-wing media ecosystem echoes this “Big Lie”.

Since the beginning of 2026—the year of the November midterm elections—attacks on the election process have stepped up considerably. The U.S. Constitution delegates full authority to the states to conduct their own elections, yet Trump has repeatedly sought to take over (i.e. federalize) national elections.

The government has been attempting to gain access to state voter rolls throughout the United States. Election ballots were seized in Fulton Country, Georgia, regarding debunked accusations of vote fraud. Ominously, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was present at the search, despite the fact that it had nothing to do with national intelligence. The government gave conflicting and contradictory reasons for her presence. Gabbard’s office has also investigated voting machines in Puerto Rico, allegedly for foreign interference by Venezuela.

The attorney general offered to lift the siege of Minneapolis if the state turned over its voter rolls—decidedly at odds with the publicly stated reasons for the invasion. Voting records for the 2020 election have recently been subpoenaed for Maricopa country, Arizona. There are unprecedented redistricting efforts during an election year expressly designed to remove Democratic districts in a number of key states, and the SAVE act is an attempt to federalize elections and disenfranchise voters by imposing what amounts to a voter ID poll tax. Software designed to check for voter citizenship keeps making mistakes, removing people incorrectly from voter rolls.

Key 2020 election denier is still working to prove it was stolen — now from inside the White House (CNN)

A Republican plan to overhaul voting is back. Here’s what’s new in the bill (NPR)

Only a fraction of House seats are competitive. Redistricting is driving that lower (NPR)

It’s now virtually certain that Trump and his minions will interfere with the upcoming midterm elections in some way. It’s been speculated that Trump will attempt to interfere in one of several ways, ranging from marginally legal to outright illegal:

1. Disenfranchise enough voters to skew the results.

2. Claim “foreign interference” in order to nullify results.

3. Claim “vote fraud” without evidence and simply appoint winners by decree.

4. Declare a “national emergency” in order to cancel elections. Note that the United States has never cancelled an election, even during the Civil War, World War One and World War Two.

This post from Hacker News does a good job of summarizing Republican vote suppression efforts going back decades, and why they don’t hold up to scrutiny:

There is a long history of Republican voter disenfranchisement:

• In the 1980s The RNC created the Ballot Security Task Force, which was a scheme to strike people off the voter rolls by sending them a mailer if they didn’t respond. This led to a consent decree requiring “preclearance” for any voter roll enforcement that lasted 25+ years;

• Republicans lead the charge in restricting access to mail-in voting because it’s used more by Democratic Party voters despite there being no evidence of fraud;

• In response to Arizona turning blue in 2020, Republicans went on a massive voter suppression spree, which disproportionately impacts Native Americans;

• Nationally, the push to have a street address unfairly impacts Native Americans who often don’t have an official [street] address if they live on a reservation. That’s not an accident. It’s the point;

• Even the push to force people to have birth certificates is aimed at Native Americans and poor people. There are quite literally millions of Americans who don’t have them;

• Even if you have the necessary documentation to get an ID, you may have problems getting access. Again, this is by design. For example, Louisiana closed a bunch of DMV offices in minority areas such that the only DMV in certain black-majority areas was only open one day a month;

• The so-called SAVE Act recently passed by the house required your birth certificate to match your ID. Well, that’s a problem for married women.

• States such as Florida have used private firms to strike people off the voter rolls if their name sounds like a convicted felon anywhere else in the country.

And why are we doing all this? There is zero evidence of voter fraud on a large scale. And those convicted of voter fraud are most commonly Republican anyway.

But let’s just say that we want an ID to vote. Why don’t we fund the Federal government to issue it and make sure it is readily available and cheap or free? No, we can’t have that because it’s never been the point.

At some point you have to realize that they don’t care about “integrity”. Voter suppression is the point because it’s the only way they can win elections.

Those who point out that other countries require a national ID to vote fail to mention that these countries also provide a nationally-issued ID card to all citizens free or cheaply as a matter of course. Not only does that not exist here, but Republicans have continually opposed doing such a thing. It’s worth noting that, not only is vote fraud more likely to be done by Republicans, Elon Musk himself conducted illegal voting activities in Georgia. And voting by illegal immigrants is vanishingly rare, as the Heritage Foundation’s own data shows:

This Will Hold

The Heritage Foundation: Only 99 Cases of Noncitizen Voting Since 1982

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9 months ago · 459 likes · 27 comments · This Will Hold

How we know voter fraud is very rare in U.S. elections (NPR)

So, if there is no reasonable, good faith argument to be made about “fraud” or “stolen elections,” what then, can be the reason for these activities? There can only be one—an attempt to steal future elections on behalf of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Elon Musk’s doge effort illegally stole reams of data from the Social Security Administration. What effectively amounted to a hack of the government’s databases led to the improper transmission of sensitive social security data to a Cloudfare server where it was improperly stored. SSA officials disclosed that doge staffers were contacted in March 2025 by a political advocacy group seeking help scrutinizing voter rolls, a group dedicated to overturning the result of the 2020 election. Is it possible that the SSA data will be used to predict voting patterns by using AI in a manner similar to Cambridge Analytica? Was this the real reason for doge, since it obviously made no beneficial impact on the federal budget or government “efficiency?”

This video from LegalEagle, below, does an excellent job of summarizing everything we know about Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2026 midterm elections. Let’s not mince words: if elections are no longer held in this country, the United States will cease to be a functional democracy, and will indisputably become a fascist dictatorship—just in time for the nation’s 250th birthday. No one will be able to deny it any longer.

7. Nationalization of economic resources and self-sufficiency

The term “socialist” in National Socialism has caused a lot of confusion. Some have even used this terminology to argue that the National Socialist German Worker’s Party was somehow a “left wing” movement, contrary to the universal opinion of historians. The National Socialists were the opposition to left-wing German parties, including socialists—and especially Communists—who were some of the earliest occupants of the concentration camps.

Many wealthy industrialists backed and financially supported the original fascists. Fritz Thyssen, Günther Quandt, Friedrich Flick, Alfred Krupp, August von Finck, Rudolf August Oetker, Wilhelm Rudolf Mann, and Ferdinand Porsche were just a few of the industrialists who became avid Nazis. There were also overseas admirers like Henry Ford, whose book, The International Jew, was popular in Nazi Germany. Of the claims of “socialism,” Robert Paxton writes:

It turned out in practice that fascists’ anticapitalism was highly selective. Even at their most radical, the socialism that the fascists wanted was a “national socialism”: one that denied only foreign or enemy property rights (including that of internal enemies). They cherished national producers. Above all, it was by offering an effective remedy against socialist revolution that fascism turned out in practice to find a space...(p. 56)

Whenever fascist parties acquired power...they did nothing to carry out these anticapitalist threats. By contrast, they enforced with the utmost violence and thoroughness their threats against socialism…Once in power, fascist regimes banned strikes, dissolved independent labor unions, lowered wage earners’ purchasing power, and showered money on armaments industries, to the immense satisfaction of employers.

Faced with these conflicts between words and actions concerning capitalism, scholars have drawn opposite conclusions. Some, taking the words literally, consider fascism a form of radical anticapitalism. Others, and not only Marxists, take the diametrically opposite position that fascists came to the aid of capitalism in trouble, and propped up by emergency means the existing system of property distribution and social hierarchy. This book takes the position that what fascists did tells us at least as much as what they said. (p. 10)

Even in this instance, there are similarities between the original fascist parties and the current administration. There has been a constant parade of business leaders and CEOs paying tribute at the White House. They’ve showered Trump with praise, bestowed him with lavish gifts, joined him at fancy private dinners, donated millions to his “presidential library,” and bought his personal cryptocurrency. We’ve already noted the tech CEOs front and center at the inauguration, and many tech CEOs have become supporters of the current administration like David Sachs, Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel, who has single-handedly bankrolled the career of the vice-president—and, of course, Musk himself. Billionaire donors swung hard for Republicans in the last election.

Tech CEOs attend Amazon-funded “Melania” screening at White House (Hollywoodreporter.com)

The government has proposed taking stakes in various companies. It has advocated owning patents. More recently, it has designated AI company Anthropic as a supply chain risk due to Anthropic’s insistence on maintaining ethical standards. Businesses have been forced to kowtow to Trump and to avoid offending Republicans, lest the regulatory authority of the government be weaponized against them. This is contrary to the “classical liberalism,” favored by traditional Conservatives where big business is left alone, free from government interference, and the government does not pick favorites. MAGA clearly believes in the merging of business interests and the state, as well as public service for private profit.

The original fascist economic program is often described as “corporatism,” which is a merging of the government and business and the regimentation of society. Fascists advocated private ownership under government control. They were hostile to unions and the labor movement in general, replacing them with state-controlled syndicates. They promoted economic self-sufficiency, sometimes using tariffs to protect domestic industries such as arms manufacturing. This was consistent with their ultranationalist project of national revival. It’s easier to control your citizenry and regiment society when they have fewer connections abroad. Self-sufficiency was pursued as a national goal due to the belligerence of fascist leaders. Often, this involved not only the development of domestic industries, but also the seizing of foreign resources like rare earth elements (Greenland) and oil (Venezuela). Cosmopolitanism values freedom and brotherhood, values which fascists oppose to due to their hierarchical vision of the world.

Unpopular Front

How Socialist were the National Socialists? Part 2

Welcome back to another Unpopular Front article on my favorite topic: the Nazis…

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6 months ago · 132 likes · 14 comments · John Ganz

We need to end it here for length. And I haven’t even mentioned the granting of pardons based on campaign donations, the disclosure of state secrets, the renaming of buildings, tearing down the White House, firing scientists, suppressing vaccines, gutting antitrust enforcement and consumer protection, financial deregulation, cutting taxes for the rich, handicapping renewable energy efforts, removing references to slavery from the nation’s museums, the criminal probe of the Federal Reserve, withholding funds from “blue” states, depriving millions of health care, connections to Christian nationalism, the deployment of the national guard, Trump’s descent into dementia, allegations of child rape, and much, much more, as these are not distinct features of fascism per se. Not even the original fascists were this corrupt, venal, and incompetent.

We’ve made the case over the last several posts that fascist is the most accurate and precise descriptor of the current government of the United States, based on the accepted historical understanding of the term. Next time, we’ll see if it’s not unreasonable to compare them to the original National Socialist German Worker’s Party—better known as the Nazis.

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We typically see the following hallmarks of fascist regimes:

• The creation of a rubber stamp legislature and rule by executive decree and the declaration of national emergencies. Another word for this is dictatorship.

• The creation of a secret police force and network of prison camps under the exclusive control of the executive.

• Persecution of scapegoats who are supposedly responsible for the nation’s downfall.

• A controlled mass media and relentless propaganda campaigns.

• Normalization of violence as a political tactic and the arrest and persecution of domestic enemies.

• Suspension of the voting process and removal of the peaceful transfer of power.

• An obsession with cultural “decline” and “degeneracy.”

• Book bans and rewriting history.

• Performative, even ostentatious brutality.

• A desire to expand the nation’s borders through force, either by seizing territory or annexation, also known as irridentism.

• Autarky and a merging of big business and the state. Direct control or ownership of domestic industries.

I argue that we’ve seen every single one of these come to fruition over the past year, further bolstering my argument that “fascism” is by far the most accurate description of the current government of the United States.

The Nazis described their process of undermining democracy as Gleichschaltung, a term which means “synchronization” of all elements of society, as with switches in an electrical circuit. The same process is now being repeated here across all elements of American culture and society. Many of the elements of this process were tailored specifically to vulnerabilities of the American governmental system and were outlined in Project 2025. As the president of the Heritage Foundation, which devised Project 2025, remarked, “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Let’s take a closer look at the evidence. Given length considerations, this can only be a cursory examination of the evidence because listing all of the evidence would run to book length. Hopefully, the information presented here is sufficient to persuade.

1. Sidelining of the legislature and rule by executive fiat.

Many historians see the passing of the Enabling Act of 1933 (Ermächtigungsgesetz) as the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship and the end of the Weimar Republic.

And while we have not seen the explicit passing of such an act today, many of the same effects have been realized by using means already on the books.

While the Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress, they have been largely absent from legislating, except for the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (and note the bizarre Newspeak in the title—indicative of leadership cult dynamics). Republican intransigence has led to the legislature being hamstrung and effectively turned into a rubber stamp while the executive branch seizes more and more power explicitly granted to the legislature by the US Constitution.

Instead of passing laws through legitimate channels, new laws and rules have been imposed through “executive orders,” which is basically rule by decree. In Trump’s first year, 225 executive orders were passed, the most since Franklin Roosevelt who took office during an economic emergency and profound crisis. One-hundred and forty executive orders were issued—more than one a day—during the first 100 days of the administration. Many of these orders were blatantly illegal or unconstitutional, yet there was no pushback from Congress. Many agencies have been illegally suspended or defunded.

List of executive orders in the second Trump presidency (Wikipedia)

Trump has signed more than 140 executive orders, a pace faster than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Republican Congress has shown little interest in pushing back on any of them. Trump has also aggressively reorganized, defunded or simply deleted entire agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. These actions have been carried out even though Congress has a clear constitutional authority over the executive branch’s budget. Again, Congress has shown little to no interest in reasserting its power, even during recent budget talks.

Congress began losing power decades ago − and now it’s giving away what remains to Trump (The Conversation)

Another method is the declaration of bogus “national emergencies.” National emergencies have been declared in regards to an alleged “invasion” at the southern border, and with regards to trade deficits which supposedly constituted an economic “emergency.” These laws were passed in the 1970s to provide a rapid response to a “first strike” economic embargo like the oil crisis, and were never intended to be used this way. The declaration of national emergencies was also a key method the Nazis used to seize control of the state. The Enabling Act, formally entitled the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich,” gave Hitler and his cabinet the right to enact laws for a period of four years without the involvement of the legislature, even if those laws deviated from the Constitution.

Fourth is the use of “unitary executive theory,” basically a blueprint for dictatorship devised by the Heritage Foundation and enabled by the Federalist Society. While the “imperial presidency” has been a trend going back many years, instead of seeing it as an unfortunate erosion of what the Founding Fathers intended, Heritage sees it as a desirable method of empowerment. One example is the use of “Schedule F” appointments, which are employees without federal civil service protections who can be removed at any time. This has been used to fill the executive branch with political appointees and loyalists rather than politically neutral civil servants.

Donald Trump exerted the greatest control over the executive during his presidency than any other modern president, often citing Article II of the Constitution. In 2019, he said, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”… Upon taking office, Trump undertook mass firings of federal employees, inspectors general, and members of independent agencies and oversight boards who could attempt to block or constrain his moves…The Supreme Court subsequently ruled in favor of the administration’s actions and an expansive view of presidential power.

Since taking office, Trump has expanded his control over executive branch agencies and the civil service, ordering many of them to target his political opponents and organizations aligned with the Democratic Party. His administration has asserted that, under unitary executive theory, it has a constitutional right to control and even cease enforcement of federal law. Legal experts described it as claiming a “constitutional power to immunize private parties to commit otherwise illegal acts with impunity”. Trump and his subordinates have been described as embracing some of the theory’s most extreme versions.

Unitary executive theory (Wikipedia)

Trump allies craft plans to give him unprecedented power if he wins the White House (NPR)

Project 2025 Tracker

Turn It and Turn It

Comparing Trump and Hitler’s Tactics During Their First Weeks in Office

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2 years ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

2. Consolidation of the media

The MAGA media strategy consists of five major tactics: 1.) The selective use of the Federal Communication Commission’s regulatory authority to approve mergers in order to enforce anticipatory compliance and threaten to shut down outlets critical of the President; 2.) The use of frivolous lawsuits (barratry) against media companies to discourage critical coverage and solicit bribes; 3.) The outright purchasing of media outlets by billionaire allies of the administration; 4.) Undermining trust in non-aligned and independent news outlets, including those based overseas; and 5.) The creation of an alternative media ecosystem which disseminates “alternative facts” in place of factual news.

Propaganda and PR played an essential role in fascist regimes, historically. Fascist movements published their own newspapers and magazines tailored specifically for their audience like the Völkischer Beobachter and Der Angriff. They were also the earliest adopters of radio as a means of disseminating propaganda. Fascists such as William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) and Ezra Pound issued radio broadcasts on behalf of fascists. Newspapers, magazines, books, films, music, art, design, and radio were all enlisted in the propaganda effort. Attacking independent news outlets and sowing doubt about the truthfulness of media outlets they did not control was a key part of this strategy, which the Nazis labeled as the “lying press,” or Lügenpresse. Reporters and news outlets have repeatedly been labeled “enemies of the people” by Trump himself. Trump has recently called for news outlets to be charged with treason for reporting negative war news.

Larry and David Ellision appear to be fulfilling the same role Alfred Hugenberg played in the Third Reich. The Ellisons have already merged Skydance and Paramount and have taken over CBS—the former home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. They paid out a huge settlement on what most lawyers saw as a frivolous lawsuit, part of which was a requirement to install a political apparatchik to search for claims of “bias” at the network. They appointed the inexperienced political lackey Bari Weiss to be the new head of CBS News, who promptly censored negative stories about the overseas torture prisons run by the United States. Departing staffers have openly stated that CBS reporters have been ordered to intentionally slant the news coverage. And now, the Ellisons have acquired CNN, one of the last remaining TV news outlets with national reach. At a recent press briefing, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth openly pined for the Ellisons to take over CNN and start slanting war coverage in his favor.

…since Ellison took the helm at Paramount, the company has been accused of bowing to Trump. It paid Trump millions of dollars after the president sued over a 60 Minutes edit of its interview of former Vice President Kamala Harris that he didn’t like. It canceled Stephen Colbert’s Late Show – one of the most bitingly critical-of-Trump shows on TV. And 60 Minutes temporarily held a segment about the El Salvadorian prison the Trump administration sent some deportees to. Those questions will remain as the company seeks to integrate with WBD – including CNN, a news outlet that Trump says he despises.

With Trump’s apparent blessing, the Ellisons are amassing a media empire (CNN)

Intimidation and propaganda have become a routine part of the Trump administration’s approach to the media. The head of the FCC, Brendan Carr, has repeatedly threatened critics of the administration, culminating in the temporary removal of Jimmy Kimmel Live from the air. More recently, Carr has stated that he plans to begin enforcing the Fairness Doctrine only for television talk shows—and not talk radio—causing CBS to preempt an interview with Democratic senatorial candidate James Talarico from appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Carr has recently demanded “more ‘patriotic, pro-America’ programming” in run-up to the nation’s 250th anniversary. More recently, he has threatened to revoke the licenses of broadcasters due to negative coverage of the Iran war debacle.

There have also been other assaults on press freedom, including a raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home, where they seized a phone, two computers and a watch. In October 2025, new rules on reporting imposed by the Pentagon prompted numerous media outlets to rescind their press passes. They were replaced by alternative right-wing outlets such as One America News, Gateway Pundit, The Epoch Times, LifeSiteNews, Human Events, Tim Pool, and Turning Point USA.

The change in Pentagon press policies and replacement of notable legacy news outlets is one of the latest decisions within the broader trend of increased press and media scrutiny under the Trump administration. Along with the momentary de-platforming of Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show on ABC in response to commentary on Charlie Kirk’s death and the Republican party, also in 2025 Congress made a $1.1 billion cut to NPR and PBS public broadcasting funds, and President Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal. Increased scrutiny related to the press and media as well as physical safety of journalists and reporting mechanisms can be found on the Press Freedom Tracker Incident Database, where relevant instances of arrest, assaults, legal orders, damages, or other tactics against the press and media can be reported upon and tracked.

2025 Pentagon press pass forfeiture (Wikipedia)

Judge who allowed FBI to search Washington Post reporter’s home rips into Justice Department (CNN)

A Timeline of Trump’s Fights With Media, Including Jimmy Kimmel and The New York Times (First Amendment Watch)

Perhaps the jewel in the crown of the right wing propaganda apparatus is their control over the online information and social media ecosystem. Tech overlords and billionaire newspaper owners like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos were front and center at the inauguration, and have slanted their coverage accordingly. Zuckerberg’s Meta abandoned fact-checking almost coincidentally with Trump’s inauguration. Bezos intervened personally to kill an endorsement of Harris by the Washington Post’s editorial staff, and directed the paper’s opinion section to focus on “personal liberties and free markets,” leading to editorial page editor David Shipley’s resignation. Bezos has now halved the Washington Post’s Newsroom while demanding double the productivity—reminiscent of his brutal business practices at Amazon.

Popular “dudebro” podcasters disseminate the administration’s talking points and disinformation on a regular basis, including Joe Rogan, the country’s most popular. There seems to be a virtually bottomless supply of right-wing media influencers and provocateurs, many of whom are closely integrated into the White House. According to a study by Media Matters, nine out of ten of the most popular online media outlets are right-leaning, even as they declare themselves a persecuted minority under constant “censorship.” As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exists.”

The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces (Media Matters)

Read this: A new report shows X is amplifying far-right accounts (AV Club)

Trump Makes It Very Clear They’re Going To Turn TikTok Into A Right Wing Propaganda Machine (Techdirt)

YouTube’s algorithm more likely to recommend users right-wing and religious content, research finds (NBC News)

Twitter’s algorithm favours right-leaning politics, research finds (BBC)

Claim of anti-conservative bias by social media firms is baseless, report finds (Guardian)

A few weeks of X’s algorithm can make you more right‑wing – and it doesn’t wear off quickly (The Conversation)

3. Normalization of political violence

While politicians of both parties have been the victims of political violence, the Trump regime has thoroughly embedded violence into its political rhetoric and methodology. The use of political terror to enforce party discipline is a hallmark of fascist regimes. Militias allied with fascist regimes such as the Squardristi and the Brownshirts spread terror in order to keep Party members in line and intimidate the opposition. In the 1922 Turin Massacre, fascists attacked members of the labor movement to break resistance to fascism among the working classes. Sometimes political terror was even used against Party members such as the 1934 Night of the Long Knives in Germany. No one was safe.

This article from Vanity Fair details some of the fear that the MAGA movement has injected into political discourse in the United States:

Senate and House Republicans know Trump will orchestrate the running of a primary challenger backed by Elon Musk’s unlimited resources if a member defies him. But this is not the whole story of Republican subservience to the president. In private, Republicans talk about their fear that Trump might incite his MAGA followers to commit political violence against them if they don’t rubber-stamp his actions.

“They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former member of Trump’s first administration tells me…

According to one source with direct knowledge of the events, North Carolina senator Thom Tillis told people that the FBI warned him about “credible death threats” when he was considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary. Tillis ultimately provided the crucial 50th vote to confirm the former Fox & Friends host to lead the Pentagon. According to the source, Tillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work...

Former Wyoming representative and prominent anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney told CNN that House GOP members confided to her that they were “afraid for their own security—afraid, in some instances, for their lives.” Representative Jason Crow of Colorado told NBC News after January 6: “I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues last night, and a couple of them broke down in tears—saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.”

This kind of incitement to stochastic violence from the movement’s rabid followers has become routine and is unprecedented in American political discourse. Many of these threats come from the very top. Trump has openly called for the execution of his political opponents:

President Donald Trump’s heated rhetoric against his perceived political enemies has resulted in a blizzard of threats against at least 22 officials on both sides of the aisle in recent weeks, according to an NBC News tally.

Among those who’ve been targeted with threats after being mentioned in social media posts by the president are numerous Democrats, including Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan — but even more Republicans, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and over a dozen Indiana state lawmakers.

Trump calls Dems’ video to service members ‘seditious behavior, punishable by death’ (ABC News)

The independent judiciary has been a particular impediment to Trump’s consolidation of power and lawlessness. For this reason, they have become a particular target of political violence. This report from 60 Minutes (somehow not censored) details the levels of violence directed at judges, and how it is coming almost exclusively from the far right:

4. Military aggression and expansionism

Initially, this was one item that did not fit with fascist regimes, historically, which tended to pursue projects of national glorification through military expansion. The Nazis declared they needed additional “living space,” or Lebensraum. The Italian fascists called it spazio vitale. By contrast, the MAGA movement campaigned on ending foreign wars and focusing primarily on domestic affairs. They promised a retreat from the world in the service of an “America First” agenda. This isolationism was not altogether inconsistent with previous fascist movements—in the pre-war United States, domestic movements sympathetic to fascism advocated for isolationism largely because they sympathized with fascist regimes and goals overseas.

However, that ended the week of the inauguration. Almost immediately talk began of annexing Canada and making Canada the “fifty-first state” (i.e. Canschluss). Then-prime minister Justin Trudeau was regularly derided as “Governor Trudeau.” Aggressive invasions were further touted for Panama and Mexico in addition to Canada. The Department of Defense was rebranded “The Department of War,” despite the fact that only Congress can rename government agencies. The FOX News host put in charge of the US Military was referred to as “the Secretary of War” and touted the new “lethality” and “warrior ethos” of the troops. No more “wokeness” or “tepid legality” would constrain their actions, he boasted. The strutting, preening Secretary, covered in Crusader tattoos, seems to take perverse delight in the aesthetics of war and destruction.

Maps were posted all over social media by MAGA faithful depicting an “American Empire” extending from Canada and Greenland all the way to South America. The U.S. began regularly blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean, allegedly for smuggling drugs, although it provided zero evidence for this allegation. So far, at least 157 civilians have been killed. One of these attacks was a so-called “double tap” strike, where shipwreck survivors were deliberately massacred—the literal textbook definition of a war crime.

Foreign adventurism escalated dramatically with the illegal abduction of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro by U.S. special forces. In the aftermath, the administration did not even try to conceal that this was a naked grab of Venezuela’s oil resources, which would be turned over to U.S oil companies while the revenues would be under the direct control of the President himself. The existing Venezuelan regime’s vice-president was retained as a puppet leader under U.S. control. The President and his advisors now declared that the United States would no longer be bound by international law. In an interview with The New York Times, the president declared the only constraint on his power was “my own morality, my own mind.” In a chilling quote that could have come directly from the pages of Mein Kampf, Trump advisor Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

In January 2025, the administration began openly declaring its intent to invade and conquer Greenland, a self-governing autonomous territory of the kingdom of Denmark. The president repeatedly stated that the United States “needed” Greenland and refused to rule out the use of military force, prompting NATO to send a tripwire force to Greenland to protect it from American aggression. Denmark took these threats very seriously, sending the Danish foreign minister and the prime minster of Greenland to Washington for crisis talks. The administration’s relentless saber-ratting over the island came to a head at the World Economic Forum, where Trump gave a rambling and unhinged speech, even as other world leaders advocated increasing economic and military separation from the erratic United States. Eventually, Trump put aside his bizarre Greenland obsession1 for the time being at the request of the NATO secretary general, Mark Rutte, yet the island remains in the crosshairs of the U.S. military to this day.

European military personnel arrive in Greenland as Trump says US needs island (BBC)

As of this writing, the administration has attacked Iran and killed their supreme leader without authorization from Congress. As with Greenland, the administration has provided incoherent and contradictory reasons for military action. The conflict with Iran has threatened to engulf the entire Middle East region, and has wreaked havoc with global oil supplies. Trump has since demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” even while refusing to name an ultimate goal of the conflict or an exit strategy. Hegseth has declared that “no quarter” will be given to the enemy against the Pentagon’s own rules of engagement and the Geneva conventions.

Next time, we’ll continue looking at more evidence, including paramilitaries, attacking elections, and concentration camps.

I’m increasingly hearing the term “fascist” used to describe the second Trump administration in popular discourse, and even increasingly in media outlets.

When I wrote my posts on Neo-fascism, the second Trump administration was only a theoretical possibility. Now that we’ve seen it in action for over a year, we are able to make a more accurate assessment. So I think it’s time to revisit the topic.

And, based on this, I think the term “fascism” is entirely justified. I think a case can be made that it fits well within the definition of historical fascism—or at least as close as it’s possible to be in the post-World War II modern age.

A lot of people will instinctively reject the term “fascism” in a knee-jerk response because the term has been thrown around so sloppily and been overused as a pejorative empty of meaning. There’s a joke which says that fascism means “politics I don’t like.” People who tell that joke usually state that the term should never be used, and will invoke something called “Godwin’s Law” to dismiss it outright (despite the fact that law’s namesake has objected to it being used that way).

But I don’t subscribe to that. The fact that some people use the term “fascism” sloppily or inaccurately should not preclude us from using it in a precise, specific way in accordance with political science and historical analysis.

That’s why, when I use the term “fascist,” I’m not using it simply as a pejorative, or as a synonym for “far right” or “authoritarian” even though other people might be using it that way. Rather, I’m using in a very clinical, descriptive sense for a type of politics very similar to what the original word was used for.

And by that criteria, I think it’s undeniable that the Trump administration and the MAGA movement is fascist by even the loosest definition of the term. And to prove that point, I’m going to rely on some academic works from historians who have thought deeply about what fascism is (and is not). I’ll be referring to The Nature of Fascism by Roger Griffin, and The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton, among others.

In the first part, I’m going to explain exactly why I think people using the term “fascist” to describe the second Trump administration and the MAGA movement are absolutely accurate, even if they are using it ignorantly of the formal definition. Then, I’m going to further argue that, not only is the Trumpist movement classically fascist, but that it’s even accurate to use the term “Nazi” to describe it. That’s a bold claim indeed, and I don’t make that claim lightly or frivolously. But I think it’s true, and I’m going to provide a lot of evidence for why I think that characterization is valid.

The common argument

The debate over fascism, as with most things political in the United States, is rather brain-dead. For most people, it seems that the terms “fascist” and “Nazi” are simply interchangeable terms, like “groundhog” and “woodchuck,” or “reindeer” and “caribou,” or perhaps “slaughterhouse” and “abattoir.”

And, for them, “Nazi” means one thing, and one thing only—antisemitism and the Holocaust. So therefore any government not overtly antisemitic and engaged in an active genocide cannot, by definition, be Nazi. And since “Nazi” and “fascist” mean the exact same thing, it is therefore impossible for any such government to be described as “fascist” either. QED.

That seems to be the crux of the argument, anyway.

This is simply wrong, of course, and quite stupid. By this standard, one—and only one—regime in all of human history could be regarded as fascist, and that would be the German government from roughly 1938 to 1945. This criteria is so extreme and narrow that it would be virtually impossible for any government to qualify as fascist—even historically! Even the Nazis themselves could not be described as fascist from 1933 to 1936 by this criteria, for example.

The problem with the argument

In fact, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party never referred to themselves as fascists. As Roger Griffin notes, many scholars believe that the Nazi Party should actually be excluded from a historical analysis of fascism, because it was so extreme and sui generis. Despite this, most scholars do include it based on the similarities to other post-war European far right political movements.

Furthermore, the term “fascism” itself was coined in Italy, not Germany, by Benito Mussolini to describe his own political movement in 1919. For the Nazis themselves, fascism would have referred to that political movement, and not to their own National Socialism, which they would have regarded as totally different and specific to Germany’s history and culture, even if they did borrow some of its methods and tactics. As Paxton writes (p. 55):

Between the two world wars, almost every nation on earth, and certainly all those with mass politics, generated some intellectual current or activist movement akin to fascism...A few fascist movements became much more successful than the general run of fascist street corner orators and bullies...These successful fascisms elbowed a space among the other contending parties or interest groups, and persuaded influential people that they could represent their interests and feelings and fulfill their ambitions better than any conventional party…Their success influenced entire political systems, giving them a more intense and aggressive tone and legitimating open expressions of extreme nationalism, Left-baiting, and racism.

As Griffin notes, in strict historical terms, there was only one fascist movement—Mussolini’s Italian Fascist party. This was the only party which came to power that specifically referred to itself as “fascist,” although there were other European political parties which adopted the name, such as the short-lived Le Fasceau in France and the British Union of Fascists led by Oswald Mosley in Great Britain1. Neither of these movements obtained any degree of actual political power, however. Italy was the first country to adopt the type of government that came to be described by that label, not Germany.

Of course, Mussolini’s fascist movement was not overtly antisemitic (although racism and national chauvinism did play a part), nor did it engage in the systematic murder of an entire race of people (although it did eventually cooperate with Germany’s efforts to do so). Thus, by the faulty logic described above, the only truly fascist movement in history could not itself be described as fascist!

That alone should demonstrate how silly the argument is. Let’s see if we can do better.

Think of it this way: if a regime came to power in a foreign country who all dressed alike, called each other “comrade,” carried copies of Mao’s Little Red Book, cited the works of Karl Marx, and sought to nationalize the means of production and overthrow—in their words—the bourgeoisie, we have no qualms whatsoever referring to them as Communists (heck, even Democrats are being called communists in this country).

In the above case, no one would say we can’t call them communists because they haven’t killed forty million people the way Mao did, or thrown as many people into gulags as the Soviet Union did. So why do we have different rules for fascism? If a regime has all the hallmarks of fascism—literally every single one—then surely we can use that term. Why not? Simply because it’s distasteful or “taboo,” or because other people have misused it?

So, how then can we determine whether or not a particular movement is fascist?

The Fascist Minimum

Roger Griffin’s book wrestles with exactly that question. It’s a rather dry, academic treatise addressed to other historians rather than the general reader. Nonetheless, its general argument and methods are not hard to grasp.

Griffin describes what he calls the “fascist minimum.” That is, the basic criteria, or “lowest common denominator” a movement has to have to be considered “fascist” as opposed to autocratic, repressive, or vaguely far right. This allows us to distinguish which regimes to apply the label “fascism” to, and which to exclude. Traditionally, repressive, authoritarian regimes such as the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe, or the military dictatorships of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, have been placed under different categories in political discourse.

Griffin refers to a concept from the German sociologist Max Weber called ideal types. Weber categorized political regimes by comparing them against an “ideal type,” which is a platonic ideal almost never realized in practice, but which allows us to categorize various political movements based on how closely they resemble this hypothetical ideal2.

He also refers to what he describes as the “mythic core” or “founding myth” of a political movement, meaning the underlying ideology which sustains and motivates its adherents and followers which is often something more emotional than practical: “The core of an ideology can be conceived as the fundamental political myth which mobilizes its activists and supporters.”

Taking all this into account, Griffin arrives at the “fascist minimum,” which he describes as:

Let’s unpack this definition. “Palingenesis” is a fancy term which refers to the notion of a kind of “rebirth.” As Griffin describes, the “mobilizing vision” of fascism is “that of the national community rising phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it.” He describes fascism’s “mythic core” as, “…rationalizing ephemeral collective movements of extreme violence, including those bent on overthrowing society when it is perceived to be in crisis and replacing it by a new order.”

The idea is that the nation was once great, but has been brought down and humiliated by its enemies. Those enemies may be external—such as hostile foreign nations—but more often they are internal, such as opposition parties, leftists, socialists, free-thinkers, nonconformists, “moral degenerates,” ethnic, sexual, and religious minorities, foreigners and immigrants. In order to restore the nation to its former greatness, then, these subversive elements must be contained and eliminated. It is essentially backwards-looking, even while promising a glorious, shining technological future. It is simultaneously both anti-modern and futuristic, something historian Jeffrey Herf has described as “Reactionary modernism.”

“Populist ultra-nationalism” is a bit more complicated. Griffin intentionally combines these terms to describe a political philosophy different than what those words mean in isolation.

“Populism” doesn’t just mean a political philosophy that is popular. It’s a very specific political style which divides the world into two groups: the “elites,” and the “common people.” The elites are depicted as those who are responsible for the fall from grace and everything wrong with society. According to this philosophy, the elites are oppressing the common people, who are depicted as the heart and soul of the nation and the only “true” citizens. By this account, the elites must be defeated and eliminated for the nation to restore its lost greatness and for the common people to throw off their oppressors. It often depicts the movement as “outsiders” or “anti-establishment” even when backed by some of the most wealthy and powerful people in the county.

In practice, populism tends to degenerate into internal strife and conflict as people try to figure out exactly who is an “elite” and who is the “common people.” For populists, the elites end up getting amalgamated into a broad, undifferentiated “they” who are unfairly persecuting us and our leader. “They” are out to get us, which leads into another common core feature of populism: paranoia and conspiracy theories.

Who this “elite” is varies according to the time and place, and from movement to movement. For the communists, it was the bourgeoisie, monarchists, and traditionalist conservatives. For the National Socialists, it was the politicians and military leaders who had lost the war for Germany and surrendered, whom they claimed were in league with a cabal of international Jewish bankers and financiers. This was the so-called “stab in the back” myth which played such an outsized role in post-war German politics3.

Modern forms of populism tend to depict different elites. Left-wing populism sees billionaires, oligarchs, big business, corporate monopolies, bankers, international finance and Wall Street as the enemies. Right-wing populism sees journalists and the media, academics, universities and higher education, the civil service, the independent judiciary, unions, college-educated professionals, scientists, the opposition party and its voters, foreigners, Muslims, leftists, immigrants, and basically everyone trying uphold the liberal (in a Lockean sense) order as “elites,” and therefore the enemy who are oppressing the “real” people, typically depicted as blue-collar, Christian, and rural.

In addition, populism claims legitimacy from the alleged support of the “common people” rather than established political institutions or elections, which they regard as hopelessly corrupt and compromised. By this standard, it does not matter whether they have a numerical majority or not, since the movement expresses the true will of the “common people,” and the “common people” are defined as those who support the movement in opposition to those who don’t.

“When populists get into power, the rhetorical discourse frames tend to be used to implement successive autocratic measures, such as limiting opposition through electoral manipulation, thwarting the free press, changing the constitution in their own favor, and circumscribing minority, civil, political, and economic rights. Populists are usually not against electoral democracy per se, but rather at odds with liberal democracy. Since they believe they represent the ‘true people,’ other people’s votes do not really count as legitimate. Consequently, they are hostile to the underlying values and principles of constitutionalism, pluralism, minority rights, and checks and balances.”

-Nils Karlson, Economist and poltical scientist, founder of the Ratio Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, former professor of political science at Linköping university, Sweden, visiting fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University, etc.

Ultra-nationalism is an extreme form of nationalism that exalts one’s own nation and racial/ethnic group above all others. Ultra-nationalism sees the country as uniquely great, superior to other nations, and destined for a special role in the world. Often ultra-nationalists believe their nation must fulfill some sort of historic destiny, duty, or higher calling (such as uniting a vast territory through conquest, or purging the world of undesirables). Ultra-nationalists reject boring, “traditional” consensus politics in favor of cult dynamics led a charismatic leader who supposedly embodies the true “will” and the “soul” of the nation and its people: “I am using ‘ultra nationalism’, … to refer to forms of nationalism which ‘go beyond’, and hence reject, anything compatible with liberal institutions or with the tradition of Enlightenment humanism which underpins them…”

Roger Griffin describes populist ultra-nationalism this way:

…populist ultra-nationalism rejects the principles both of absolutism and of pluralist representative government…it thus repudiates both ‘traditional’ and ‘legal/rational’ forms of politics in favour of prevalently ‘charismatic’ ones in which the cohesion and dynamics of movements depends almost exclusively on the capacity of their leaders to inspire loyalty and action.

It tends to be associated with a concept of the nation as a ‘higher’ racial, historical, spiritual or organic reality which embraces all the members of the ethical community who belong to it. Such a community is regarded by its protagonists as a natural order which can be contaminated by miscegenation and immigration, by the anarchic, unpatriotic mentality encouraged by liberal individualism, internationalist socialism, and by any number of ‘alien’ forces allegedly unleashed by ‘modern’ society, for example the rise of the ‘masses’, the decay of moral values, the ‘levelling’ of society, cosmopolitanism, feminism, and consumerism.

For the sake of succinctness ‘ultra nationalism’ will henceforth be used exclusively with the qualifying connotations of ‘populist’ outlined here.

Whereas traditional political parties see opposition parties as partners in good-faith dialogue over the direction of the country; and cooperation, compromise and consensus-building as ways to achieve those goals, palingenic ultra-nationalism sees those who disagree with them as enemies and traitors to be abolished, not negotiated with. Thus its end goal is the elimination of all political opposition, and those who disagree with their vision of society, in order to carry out their utopian political program of national “rebirth.”

So, does Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” movement meet the “fascist minimum”—the minimum criteria that must be met in order to qualify as a fascist movement historically?

I think it’s pretty obvious that it does. Populist? Check. Ultra-nationalist? Check. Anti-rational and anti-modern? Check. Charismatic authority? Check. Palingenic? I mean, it’s right there in the name! As Trump proclaimed, “He who saves his Country does not violate any law.”

Beyond the fascist minimum

Robert Paxton’s book, The Anatomy of Fascism, is a bit more of an easy read for non-historians. He points out that it’s useless to try and assign a specific political program to fascism, since the fascist political style was not based on any sort of rational policies. Instead, it rejected the “boring” procedural methods and consensus politics of liberal democracy in favor of the charismatic, apocalyptic, populist ultranationalism described above. As such, it exists outside of the customary political paradigms of “left and “right.”

Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence...Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize” his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Encyclopedia Italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.”

Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent. Programs were casually fluid...Fascism’s radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program, as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification. Das Blut or la razza would determine who was right...

Paxton also notes that one of the core defining features of fascism is that it relies on scapegoating and persecution of an enemy in order to motivate its followers. “Traditional” political parties advance their program through the legislature. Fascist movements, by contrast, are driven by their opposition to an enemy, whether it’s members of an opposition party or an ethnic group, and they are willing to pursue the elimination of their enemies through undemocratic and extralegal means if necessary. While people fixate on the German persecution of the Jews (which also included Sinti and Roma people, political opponents, Poles, Slavs, homosexuals, and the disabled, among others), Paxton notes that the “enemy” varies with whichever country fascism takes root:

Fascists saw enemies within the nation as well as outside. Foreign states were familiar enemies, though their danger seemed to intensify with the advance of Bolshevism and with the exacerbated border conflicts and unfulfilled national claims that followed World War I.

Internal enemies grew luxuriantly in number and variety in the mental landscape as the ideal of the homogeneous national state made difference more suspect. Ethnic minorities had been swollen in western Europe after the 1880s by an increased number of refugees fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe. Political and cultural subversives—socialists of various hues, avant-garde artists and intellectuals—discovered new ways to challenge community conformism. The national culture would have to be defended against them...

Fascists need a demonized enemy against which to mobilize followers, but of course the enemy does not have to be Jewish. Each culture specifies the national enemy. Even though in Germany the foreign, the unclean, the contagious, and the subversive often mingled in a single diabolized image of the Jew, Gypsies and Slavs were also targeted. American fascists diabolized blacks and sometimes Catholics as well as Jews. Italian Fascists diabolized their South Slav neighbors, especially the Slovenes, as well as the socialists who refused the war of national revival. Later they easily added to their list the Ethiopians and the Libyans, whom they tried to conquer in Africa. (pp. 36-37, my emphasis)

According to Paxton, rather than a coherent political program, fascist leaders relied instead on the “mobilizing passions” to recruit followers to the movement and gain power, hence the ideological inconsistency and ad hoc rationalizations. This is one of the reasons scholars have such a hard time trying to define fascism. It was more a collection of methods than a single, consistent ideology like liberalism or Marxism. One historian compared it to “nailing jello to a tree.”

Fascisms seek out in each national culture those themes that are best capable of mobilizing a mass movement of regeneration, unification, and purity, directed against liberal individualism and constitutionalism and against Leftist class struggle. The themes that appeal to fascists in one cultural tradition may seem simply silly to another. The foggy Norse myths that stirred Norwegians or Germans sounded ridiculous in Italy, where Fascism appealed rather to a sun-drenched classical Romanità.

Paxton describes those mobilizing passions as:

• a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;

• the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;

• the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;

• dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

• the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

• the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny;

• the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;

• the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;

• the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

These criteria, I would argue, are all applicable to the MAGA movement. It has no clear, well-defined, consistent ideology aside from what Donald Trump wants at any given moment (Führerprinzip). FOX News will decide what is right. It rejects reason and rationality and relies instead on “mobilizing passions” rather than any coherent political program. It is obsessed with enemies and victimhood. It revels in the punishment of those it hates (i.e. “the cruelty is the point”). And it believes in a hierarchical, Darwinian, dog-eat-dog world where the strong dominate the weak and are above the rule of law.

I’m not a fan of the “checklist” method of determining whether a movement is fascist or not because I find such checklists to be arbitrary and imprecise. But if you are interested in that type of approach, historian Brett Deveraux has done such a thing on his popular blog using Umberto Eco’s fourteen-point checklist:

New Acquisitions: 1933 and the Definition of Fascism (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)

It’s worth noting that Deveraux wrote list this when Trump was still a candidate, and not yet President. Many of his examples are no longer theoretical but have been actively realized in practice, and we could probably list even more accurate and damning evidence today.

For what it’s worth, my own rough-and-ready definition of fascism is “a form of authoritarian reactionary populism.” That is, for me to consider a political movement as fascist, it has to be that at minimum, with a few other characteristics (not that I’m any great historian, of course).

We’ve already covered “populism,” above; fascism is obviously of the right-wing variety. Trump claims to speak for the “forgotten man,” or the “silent majority.” “Authoritarianism” is both a political style and a personality type. Authoritarianism stresses obedience, loyalty and conformity above all other values. It abandons any notion of objective morality with subservience to authority. It takes an inflexible “the rules are the rules” approach and deems those who suffer punishment for any transgression whatsoever as “deserving what they get.” It rejects pluralism and democracy in favor of a single faction—or even a despot—issuing orders. It is often based around tribalism and the leader’s cult of personality which followers can rally behind. It tends to celebrate the patriarchal “strict father” archetype. According to psychologist Robert Altmeyer, authoritarian followers have the following personality traits:

1. a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society;

2. high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and

3. a high level of conventionalism.

I’ve talked about what “reactionary” means in political science before. It’s often used as a pejorative for people who tack to the right of the “traditional” right-wing parties which are more conventional, or simply as a synonym for “far right.” But, in reality, a political reactionary is someone who wants to return to a previous state of society and is willing to engage in violence in order to do so. Rather than the conventional right-wing concerns about things such as tax rates and business regulations, reactionary politics is a totalizing, all-encompassing vision of a new social order.

In practice, reactionaries tend to have a ultraconservative social views. They disparage “feminism” and childless people, and resent the increased visibility of ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. They want to blend church and state in the manner similar to pre-Enlightenment European monarchies. They want a hierarchical, patriarchal society where women are chattel and confined to the domestic sphere, segregated from politics and leadership as exemplified by the Nazi slogan “Kinder, Küche, Kirche4” (and by the currently trendy “tradwife” movement). They disparage “multiculturalism,” atheism and and “degeneracy” (by which they mean transgressing gender norms), and wish to return to an imagined homogeneous ethnostate. It is deeply imbued with cultural pessimism and obsessed with notions of decadence and decline, from which it derives its revolutionary ethos5.

A reactionary is a person who wants to reverse political changes and seeks to restore society to a state believed to have existed before. It is usually used pejoratively to describe a conservative opposed to modernity. Like much of the political language of left-wing and right-wing, the usage arose as a result of the French Revolution. Some authors have described them as reverse revolutionaries, for they also believe in radical change envisioning a utopia, except this utopia is to be found in the past.

In political science, a reactionary or reactionarist can be defined as a person or entity holding political views that favor a return to a previous political state of society that they believe possessed characteristics that are negatively absent from the contemporary status quo of a society. As an adjective, the word reactionary describes points of view and policies meant to restore a past status quo.

Reactionary Populism (Populism Studies)

I think it’s pretty indisputable that the modern Republican party can be accurately described as an “authoritarian reactionary populist movement,” which fits with my definition of fascism. Its reactionary tilt is subsumed under the anodyne phrase of “culture war.” For example, Turning Point USA ambassador Evan Kilgore posted on X, “Women, back to the kitchen; Abortions, illegal; Gays, back in the closet; Interracial marriage, banned; Illegals, pack your bags; trannies, back to the asylums; Jesus, back in our schools.” Its authoritarian personality cult is glaringly obvious. It is averse to democracy. It wants to roll back society to a time when they think America was supposedly “great.” Its leaders persistently claim to be “saving” the country. And it enthusiastically embraces the politics of hate, seeing itself in total war with the opposition and willing to use the organs of the state to forcibly suppress any and all opposition and dissent.

The people who support Donald Trump, yet reject this term, are simply in denial. They know that fascism is bad, so therefore they reject the label via some sort of rationalization (such as the nonsensical argument described above), despite the fact that their beliefs conform exactly to those held by original fascists, the only differences being culturally specific (e.g. hatred of immigrants instead of Jews, worshiping Trump instead of Mussolini, watching Newsmax instead of listening to Goebbels, or imprisoning Democrats instead of Communists).

Next time, we’ll take a closer look at some of the events which have unfolded over the past year which make the Republican Party’s embrace of fascism even more obvious, events which include:

• The creation of a vast paramilitary force loyal only to the executive and the construction of a vast surveillance state under the guise of “immigration enforcement.”

• The sidelining of the legislature and declaration of frivolous “national emergencies” in order to seize more power for the executive.

• The takeover of the judiciary or, failing that, simply ignoring the law.

• The creation of a loyal propaganda network, attacking non-aligned news media, arresting journalists, and buying up media outlets.

• Attempted censorship of critics and persecution of political enemies.

• The sanctioned extrajudicial killing of American citizens.

• The arrest and detention of American citizens.

• Calling for the execution of members of the opposition party.

• The depiction of political opponents as “domestic terrorists”

• The arrest of opposition party members.

• The deployment of political terrorism and stochastic violence to keep party members in line and intimidate opponents.

• Military occupation of American cities against the express wishes of the citizenry and local politicians.

• Extreme secrecy and a pervasive culture of fear.

• Attempts to rewrite history.

• Undermining the peaceful transfer of power via democratic elections and questioning the results of those elections only during losses.

In addition, I’ll look at the factors which make me think this administration goes beyond simply generic fascism, and can be justifiably compared with the original NSDAP:

• Racism and white supremacy.

• Ethnic cleansing.

• The establishment of a vast archipelago of concentration camps, including overseas, which have been documented as having unsanitary conditions, and even rape and torture. Many people have already “disappeared” from these camps, and several deaths have been recorded.

• Belief in Social Darwinism and contempt for the “weak and “unfit.”

• A fixation with genes, eugenics, and IQ.

• Embrace of occultism and “alternative therapies.”

• A cult of martyrdom.

• The elucidation of a romantic, nationalist “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden) doctrine in place of democratic ideals.

• A desire to expand the nation’s borders militarily, to the point of threatening neighboring countries and close allies with invasion (known as irredentism).

There is no “quantity threshold” for fascism—it does not suddenly become fascism once a certain specific number is reached. It does not matter whether the regime arrests one journalist or one hundred; whether it detains a dozen people in concentration camps or one million; whether ten people mysteriously die in state custody or ten thousand, or whether the paramilitary thugs gun down two innocent people in the street or two thousand. Fascism is still fascism.

I’ll end with this interview with the two historians of fascism I cited above:

Roger Griffin, an emeritus professor of modern history at Oxford Brookes University in the U.K. and a widely cited political theorist on the topic, offers one explanation: an authoritarian, “revolutionary form of extreme nationalism” that often incorporates racism, xenophobia, male chauvinism and the culture of violence. “It sees things like communism and liberalism as a threat to society,” he told NPR.

A recent NPR investigation found more than 100 instances in which Trump has said his opponents, critics and private citizens should be investigated, prosecuted, jailed or otherwise punished. He’s accused ideological opponents of being “the enemy from within.”

The “enemy from within” rhetoric is a key facet of fascism, said Griffin, author of The Nature of Fascism. “Fascists are obsessed with the idea that the present state of the nation is decadent. The world is falling apart. It’s got inner and outer enemies. There are forces at work destroying sacred, eternal truths or important things about the nation or the race,” he said…

For Robert Paxton, a foremost scholar on fascism, focusing on the followers is just as important in trying to understand fascism, according to the Times.

Paxton, a former Columbia University professor and author of The Anatomy of Fascism, was previously only convinced that Trump bore some staples of fascism.

But he said his mind changed after Jan. 6. In a Times interview published last week, he confirmed that he was no longer opposed to calling Trump a fascist after the Capitol siege. Trump’s brand of fascism, Paxton told the Times, is “bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms,” when Mussolini and Hitler leveraged mass discontent to gather support…

Harris called Trump a ‘fascist.’ Experts debate what fascism is — and isn’t (NPR)

P.S. Jonathan Rauch of The Atlantic makes the same point using different criteria here: Yes, It’s Fascism (archive link). Note that Rauch was initially reluctant to use the term.

Over Trump’s past year, what originally looked like an effort to make the government his personal plaything has drifted distinctly toward doctrinal and operational fascism. Trump’s appetite for lebensraum, his claim of unlimited power, his support for the global far right, his politicization of the justice system, his deployment of performative brutality, his ostentatious violation of rights, his creation of a national paramilitary police—all of those developments bespeak something more purposeful and sinister than run-of-the-mill greed or gangsterism.

When the facts change, I change my mind. Recent events have brought Trump’s governing style into sharper focus. Fascist best describes it, and reluctance to use the term has now become perverse. That is not because of any one or two things he and his administration have done but because of the totality. Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.

If I were hungry, I would not tell you;

For the world is Mine, and all its fullness.

Will I eat the flesh of bulls,

Or drink the blood of goats?”

—PSALM 50 (NKJV)

But, O divine servants, exercise caution:

Draw not nigh unto El’s son, Death,

Lest he devour thee as a lamb within his maw,

And crush thee as a young goat between his jaws.

—Ugaritic Baal Cycle, c. 1400 B.C.E.

One of the things I enjoy is exploring used bookstores and finding obscure treasures. Recently, while browsing the anthropology section, I found a book by the sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich entitled Blood Rites. The book purports to explain the origins of war, or more precisely, the human propensity to wage war.

I’m not sure the book ever answers the question definitively, but it did have some interesting ideas and concepts I hadn’t thought of before. Whether accurate of not, it did provide some food for thought. It’s a long one, so let’s dive in (my emphasis, unless otherwise noted).

Warfare: Rational or Irrational?

There are two basic theories of why we make war. One is that war is waged for practical—even rational—purposes, such as the acquisition of territory or resources, eliminating threats, vanquishing enemies, and so on. Viewed through this lens, there is nothing irrational about war—it is simply the pursuit of individual or collective self-interest. Ehrenreich illustrates this with a famous quote from Von Clausewitz: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” In other words, war is simply a more violent way of getting what you want.

This is why many people argue that warfare must have been rare before humans settled down and started farming and herding. Once we had storehouses full of grain and herds full of animals, the argument goes, there were resources for the taking, whereas before this time we were mobile hunter-gatherers with few fixed resources or commitments to any one place, so we could easily move away from aggressors. Why attack your neighbors when they don’t have anything you need or want? It is only much later, the argument goes, when populations got bigger and resources became scare that attacking your neighbors became a logical thing to do.

This “rationalist” view of warfare fell out of favor around World War One, and it’s easy to see why. World War One was the ultimate war of irrationality. Millions of people died, and for what? What did anyone ultimately gain from the conflict (besides weapons manufacturers)? It was death and destruction on an epic scale based on seemingly nothing concrete, whereas, before this time, war was romanticized—celebrated, even. In the aftermath, war was seen as a kind of collective madness or frenzy that swept everyone up in its grip.

This led many people who lived through that era to conclude that war was not a rational pursuit at all, but instead driven by dark, irrational forces buried deep within the human psyche. The most well-known of these were the theories of Sigmund Freud. Freud—who lived through World War One—postulated that humans possessed an innate “death instinct” (Thanatos) that was just as strong as our urge for life and self-preservation (Eros). After Freud, it became fashionable to blame subconscious drives and desires, often rooted in early childhood experiences, to explain much of human behavior, including our supposed propensity for war and violence.

In the nineteen-sixties, as the Vietnam War raged, these ideas became more prevalent. Anthropologists discovered that many tribes in remote areas with few resources nonetheless waged war on one another, sometimes with no ultimate objective besides fighting. Perhaps most disturbing, the late primatologist Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees in the wild—our closest living relatives—strategically kill members of other chimpanzee groups in what was dubbed the “Gombe War.” Many explanations were offered as to why this behavior was somehow “unnatural” or human-induced, but none of these ultimately held up, and subsequent evidence has only confirmed her observations1. We now know that chimpanzees kill other chimpanzees, either alone or as members of coalitions.

After this time, it became fashionable to blame genetics for human conflict—a variation of original sin. The pendulum swung all the way in the opposite direction. Humans were hard-wired for violence and war on a fundamental, genetic level, we were told, and hunter-gatherers were not only not peaceful, but violent savages, with virtually everybody perishing from homicide. Steven Pinker argued that, not only was prehistory not peaceful, it was a non-stop bloodbath before centralized states gained a monopoly on violence. The wars of the twentieth century, with its millions of innocent victims and industrialized slaughter, he said, was actually the most peaceful time in human existence.

While we are not the only species to kill members of our own kind, Ehrenreich notes that we are the only species to sacralize killing, that is, to turn it into a kind of religious act. This leads her to ponder the similarities between war and religion. Both war and religion are collective, social acts. Historian Arnold Toynbee even argued that war had become a substitute for religion in European societies that had become increasingly secular. For many societies, Ehrenreich notes, war is kind of collective “high.” During wartime, people put aside their differences and come together.

This leads Ehrenreich to point out an interesting fact—often times the ostensible goal of a conflict is less important than the idea of sacrificing oneself for a greater cause. People celebrated the heroic sacrifices of those who died on the battlefield in World War One even if they thought the war was ultimately futile and their deaths were pointless. Even today, when people die in combat, we say they have made “the ultimate sacrifice.” We suppress dissent by saying that their sacrifice must not be “in vain.” Memorials to those who have been sacrificed on the altar of war and cemeteries for the fallen have turned into secular shrines in countries all around the world, steeped in solemn reverence, and annual ceremonies are held to commemorate the dead, further illustrating the link between war and religion.

To answer this question, she takes a look at the most fundamental human religious practice of all—sacrifice.

Blood Rites

The notion of “sacrifice” provides the most immediate link between war and religion. While today it has disappeared in all but a handful of traditional religions where it is usually seen by outsiders as “primitive” and “barbaric,” sacrifice was, for most of human history, the fundamental religious practice everywhere on earth. The ritual was performed by cultures all over the world with myriad belief systems, gods, and religious practices, and was remarkably similar in form everywhere. Even cultures which did not have ready access to domesticated animals practiced ritual bloodletting in service of the gods—blood rites were universal2.

…contemporary historians of religion remind us of what religious practitioners often prefer to ignore or forget: that blood sacrifice is not just “a” religious ritual; it is the central ritual of the religions of all ancient and traditional civilizations. For thousands of years, the core religious ritual from the highlands of the Andes to the valley of the Ganges was the act of sacrificial killing. The temple that housed the altar, or the raised platform or stone circle that constituted the holy place, was also an abattoir…( p. 24, 32)

“Animal sacrifice,” Burkert tells us, “was an all-pervasive reality in the ancient world.” Hebrew sacrificial ritual resembled that of the Greeks, which in turn resembled that of the Egyptians and Phoenicians, the Babylonians and Persians, the Etruscans and the Romans…

In the ancient world, according to Burkert, the ritual of animal sacrifice was a profoundly gripping, even terrifying spectacle…The names of the gods who were the recipients of the sacrifices varied from culture to culture, but the main elements of the ritual were everywhere recognizable and familiar to the ancients: the procession, the climactic throat-slitting or beheading, the butchering, the examination of entrails, the ritual uses of the fresh blood, the burning or cooking of the remains.

All these bloody rituals belong in the same broad category of socially sanctioned violence where we might locate war, and appear to be speaking to some of the same concerns as war…(p. 26, 28)

What is a sacrifice? Most basically, a sacrifice is offering of food to the gods, and the gods especially desired meat. Sacrifice was the main way the gods were venerated in ancient societies. Honorific sacrifices brought gods and humans together for a communal feast. Most of the time, much of the sacrifice was consumed by people and the god was satisfied with the smell of burning leftovers. Sacrifices where the entire offering was presented to the god that did not involve a shared meal—where the god got everything—were piacular and were usually performed to expiate sins or crimes (including human sacrifice). Sacramental sacrifices involved a mystical union with the god where the god was perceived as being present in the meal itself. Sacrifice bound humans to the gods, and humans to each other.

As humans left hunting and gathering behind for agriculture and domestication, meat was not as commonly eaten as it is today. Sacrifice therefore provided a well-regulated system to consume animal flesh with an acknowledgement of the sacred status of the animal similar to the previous hunter-gatherer era. It was also the way by which the gods communicated with humans. The entrails of sacrificial animals were examined for messages from the gods—known as divination, and omens during the sacrifice were observed with great care. Sacrifices had to be performed in a very specific, proscribed manner, and those who knew how to do this properly were priests. Priests performing sacrifices (invariably men) recur all throughout the ancient world including Israel, Greece, India, Africa, Polynesia, the Americas, and other places. As a result, priests usually had very high status in these societies. Thus, sacrifice helped organize pre-state human societies into hierarchies (the prefix hiero- means “sacred”).

One popular theory of sacrifice is that it’s a kind of “release valve.” By redirecting violence toward a ceremonial victim, the theory goes, internal violence between members of the group is reduced. According to Rene Girard, both war and religion stem from this imperative of tamping down violence and redirecting the inherent conflict that comes from living in social groups toward either some kind of internal scapegoat or an external enemy in order to maintain peace and social cohesion. According to Girard:

“Religion in its broadest sense…must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds man’s efforts to defend himself by curative or preventative means from his own violence.” (emphasis in original)

“We see here the principle behind all ‘foreign’ wars: aggressive tendencies that are potentially fatal to the cohesion of the group are redirected from within the community to outside it.” (pp. 29-30)

Another theory has it that sacrifice stems from the guilt that humans feel towards their prey. Walter Burkert believed that the sacrificial ritual was a means of dealing with the unease humans felt in the act of killing. Many sacrificial rituals featured an apology to the victim, or an excuse. We must kill to sustain ourselves, the logic goes, even though we feel an inherent revulsion toward the act, so we surround it with ritual and ceremony to assuage our guilty conscience. Ehrenreich quotes the religious historian Karl Luckert:

“For their sins of killing, primitive hunters developed and performed religious retreat rituals—primarily to alleviate feelings of guilt. They atoned for their trespasses.”

Anthropologist Nancy Jay developed a feminist theory of sacrifice. She felt that sacrifice was a surrogate for men’s inability to give birth. Men bestowed priesthood through sacrifice the way women bestow life through birth. Sacrifice set up a parallel male universe akin to the birth process where males can control ritual access to the divine. By passing down ritual knowledge through male lineages, patriarchal structures are maintained and enforced.

It makes sense that a hunting species whose cognition had expanded enough to create something like religion would enshrine the act of killing an animal as part of its religious practices. But is there a deeper and more profound connection between war, religion, and sacrifice? And why did the gods desire meat most of all?

The Defense Hypothesis

The “hunting hypothesis” argues that much of what is unique about human behavior and culture is a byproduct of our environmental niche as big-game hunters.

What’s unusual about humans is that we are an apex predator that did not start out that way. Primates originated as tree-dwelling omnivores who ate mostly fruit, nuts, and leaves, which makes us different than obligatory carnivores like the big felines, pack hunting canines, and raptor birds who specialized in the art of killing throughout their evolutionary career. By contrast, killing didn’t come “naturally” to our species. Instead, that capability was honed over countless millennia, and this drove evolution to make us into what we are today according to this hypothesis:

According to the “hunting hypotheses,” as it is known, prehumans emerged from the African forests into the savannah 2 to 3 million years ago, developed a taste for meat, and began to organize their lives around its acquisition. Supposedly, everything “human” followed from this carnivorous predilection.

Gender roles were laid down by the impossibility of taking infants and children along on the hunt. The use of tools—or more narrowly, weapons—tightened hand-eye coordination and sharpened the hominid brain. The cooperation required for the hunt called forth speech and some of the earliest forms of social organization. Humans’ distinctly avid sexuality evolved to keep the make hunter-providers loyal to child-bound females who waited at home for their share of the meat. And so on. Hunger was the original challenge, meat was the answer, and all else followed from that…

A hunting species, the argument goes, is hard-wired to kill. War, then, is simply our innate desire to kill directed toward members of our own kind. Ritual sacrifice is due to the fact that humans, unlike natural-born killers, are not born with this instinct, and so we must sacralize the act of killing to deal with the guilt we feel towards our prey, especially if that prey happens to be other humans.

But more recently the hunting hypothesis has somewhat fallen out of favor. Studies have shown that most human calories are provided by the gathering of plant and vegetable matter, and probably always have been, meaning that hunting was less of a big deal than originally thought. It’s argued that an exclusively male-coded activity like hunting is unlikely to have influenced the evolutionary trajectory of the entire species, and if hunting was not an exclusively male-coded activity (as more evidence is suggesting), then many premises of the hypothesis fall apart. Some have also argued that the human specialization in big-game hunting is a fairly recent phenomenon, fully developing only within the last 50-70,000 years or so—too recent to sufficiently explain the deep roots of human behavior. Even if big game hunting has an older vintage, it fails to account for what happened for the countless millennia before humans arrived at the top of the food chain.

It is here that Ehrenreich introduces an alternative hypothesis that provides much of the theoretical foundation for the book: The Defense Hypothesis. Ehrenreich argues that humans have spent just as much of our evolutionary history—or even more—as the prey of larger, more ferocious animals which roamed the earth.

Even today, being stalked or pursued by a wild animal is one of our most common fears. A disproportionate amount of our dreams, studies reveal, involve us being chased or fleeing from some sort of animal, and this is just as true for city dwellers who have never encountered anything more dangerous than a squirrel. Contemporary wild primates—including apes—will sometimes fall victim to carnivore attacks; savannah chimpanzees have been observed rallying to collective defense to fight off such creatures. While Louis Leakey remarked that “man is not cat food,” Ehrenreich begs to differ, citing an abundance of hominid fossils which betray clear evidence of predation by other animals, including bite and claw marks. One of the more heart-rending examples is the Tuang Child (Australopithecus africanus) who was apparently snatched by a bird of prey. Even today Australian aborigines and !Kung hunter-gatherers organize their camps around the imperatives of defending against wild animals.

The need to defend ourselves against large, aggressive carnivores, she says, may have been just as formative for group dynamics and our ultrasocial nature as the desire to hunt. This imperative for defense would have forced us to develop tight-knit social bonds. Group living and intelligence—the hallmarks of our species—would have been absolutely necessary for survival in a world chock full of larger, stronger, fiercer animals seeking to have us for dinner.

Interestingly, our innate willingness to “sacrifice” ourselves to defend the members of our group may stem from this primordial need to defend ourselves from predation. Baboons, who also dwell in open grasslands, seek safety in numbers and have some of the largest multilevel social groups among primates. Baboon males patrol the perimeter of the group and have been known to sacrifice themselves to defend the group—so much so that up to 80 percent of young males do not survive to maturity. As Sebastian Junger notes in his book, Freedom, “The willingness to risk death for non-kin is unique to humans and may serve to keep large groups from splintering into smaller ones that would have an even harder time defending themselves.” (p. 77)

It might also explain our unique parenting style. Human infants are especially frail and vulnerable—an easy meal for a predator. Parents would have had to lavish extensive attention and care to protect their young from harm. Human infants display an extreme tendency toward separation anxiety—even a few minutes outside of parental custody induces fits of crying and despair. Infants of other species do not display this same level of separation anxiety. This would be consistent with the newborns of a helpless, vulnerable species that needed constant parental care and protection to survive to adulthood. Natural selection may have even favored babies with the loudest, most disturbing cries.

Many scholars now believe that before humans hunted, we scavenged meat from the kills of predators like the now-extinct Megantereon. While people might find the idea of “man the scavenger” distasteful, it explains how early hominids obtained meat in the absence of inherent physical attributes like sharp teeth and claws and before we were able to make powerful enough weapons to hunt and kill on our own. This activity would have also called for high intelligence and cooperative behavior to procure meat from the kills of larger predators. This is especially true in the case of so-called “active” or “confrontational” scavenging, in which the predator is driven off by the scavenger. Humans could have banded together and thrown rocks to drive off large predators, as is still done today. We have a unique ability to throw projectiles not seen in other primates, which may have been a stepping stone to the use of more complex projectile weapons like slings and javelins3. We can also coordinate our movements moreso than other primates, which leads to things like dancing and marching.

The behaviors required for collective resistance may have helped establish the rudiments of hominid “culture.” In his most recent book, historian William H. McNeill addresses the human propensity for “keeping together in time,” as through group dancing and military drilling, and suggests that it can be traced to the primordial sociality of the hominid bands confronting a wild animal. Possibly the invention of music, as well as the nearly universal practice of dancing, owes much to the exigencies of anti-predator behavior. (p. 82)

By replacing hunting with scavenging, our evolutionary trajectory looks rather different. Rather than being shaped by a predominantly male activity like hunting, scavenging would have also required close cooperation and collective action by all members of the group—women included. In this view, extensive parenting was shaped by the need to protect our vulnerable offspring from predators, and sex wasn’t a tradeoff for meat from male hunters.

Once we acknowledge that our distant ancestors were prey as well as predators, we can imagine human evolution being driven, not only by appetite, but by the imperatives of defense. The evolution of human intelligence, for example, has often been credited almost entirely to cooperative big-game hunting, with its requirements of communication and weapon use. But obviously defense would have also required insight, cooperation, and new technologies.

In fact, Johns Hopkins paleobiologist Steven M. Stanley has recently proposed that the turning point in hominid evolution came when climatic changes pushed our ancestors out of the trees and into the predator-infested savannah. It was, he argues, “the need for self-defense while living freely on the ground [that] was the primary driving force behind the natural selection that created the large brain of Homo.”

Similarly, the first use of fire may not have been for warmth and cooking so much as to ward off predators in the night; the first sharpened stones may have been defensive weapons as well as tools of the hunt. Even that supremely human accomplishment, language, may have roots in simple alarm calls, such as those used by animals to warn their followers of a predator’s approach. (pp. 52-53)

Scavenging would have put us in an ambivalent relationship with predator beasts, who would have simultaneously seen as both killer and provider. We depended upon the predator to provide us with meat, but we also knew that any one of us could wind up in its jaws at any time. Religion, she suggests, may have originally begun as a way of mentally coping with the randomness and threat of constant attack and death by predation.

Scavenging would have thrown our ancestors into a highly ambivalent relationship with the predator beasts. One the one hand, the predators are of course destroyers, winnowing out the weak and the unwary from the hominid band. On the other hand, the beasts who kill become, in their own way, providers: Partly eaten kills left by big cats, for example, attract hyenas, wild dogs, and at one time, probably inept carnivores like our hominid ancestors, who initially had no means of felling a large game animals on their own. (p. 70)

Ehrenreich points out something else interesting about sacrifice: in every religious tradition, the sacrificial meat was conceived as an offering to the gods. The gods had an innate appetite for meat—that is, they were carnivores, ones that needed to be continually fed. Not only did the gods lust after meat, but they were often portrayed as ferocious, terrifying, insatiable—the same way we might describe a predatory animal.

This leads Ehrenreich to posit that the gods—or at least our perception of them—may derive from our evolutionary relationship with the larger, stronger animals who dominated the planet throughout much of our evolutionary history. Sometimes large predatory animals have been worshiped directly like lions, wolves and sharks. The skulls of ancient predators have been found, for example, in paleolithic caves set up as a kind of “altar.” Feeding the gods, then, was seen as a way of appeasing them to stave off misfortune and chaos. The gods demanded blood and, if they did not get it, calamity was sure to follow.

Practitioners of sacrifice have interpreted the rite in a highly specific and concrete way. Sacrifice is the means by which humans feed the god or gods, the victim is in fact a meal.

Thus the Olympian gods savored the smell of roasting meat arising from the sacrificial altars and, at least in the work of the ancient Greek comic poets, complained about the size of their share of the meat; the Aztec’s sun god would be extinguished without its steady diet of sacrificial human blood; the Mayan gods seem to have required blood for sustenance; Inca gods “ate” sacrificial llamas; Hawaiian gods “smack[ed] their lips” at the sight of their intended victims. The Hebrew god was too ethereal to be imagined actually eating, but in the Bible, the divine fire sometimes spurts forth excitedly and literally consumes the flesh lying upon the altar…(pp. 30-31)

Here we must confront the unsettling equivalence, implicitly in the discussion so far, between the predator beast and deities of ancient and traditional religions…The sacrificial offering is the “food” of the gods, and the food must, in all cases, be meat. This may mean simply that the gods are anthropomorphic and share the human preference for meat. Or it may mean that the sacrifice-devouring gods represent the killer beasts that were the original meat-eaters. Anthropologist Karl Luckert would seem to favor the latter explanation, asserting that the gods of hunting peoples “were mostly greater-than-humanoid hunters who, accordingly, appeared mostly in the form of predators.”(p. 73)

If this were true, then we would expect to see humans themselves as the sacrificial victims as well, and that is, in fact, what we find. Ehrenreich details many cases of human sacrifice seen in cultures all over the world. Mayan priests tore the hearts out of living captives to “feed” the Jaguar god with a “claw knife” resembling the claw of an animal. The Aztecs sacrificed tens of thousands atop their pyramids because they believed it kept the universe functioning in an orderly, predictable manner. The Aztec word for an altar also signified a dining table. In fact, the preponderance of human sacrifice in the Americas may stem from the lack of sacrificial animals to take their place. Ehrenreich notes a certain ambiguity between human and animal sacrificial victims in various myths, perhaps most familiar from the story of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac in the Bible.

In a chapter entitled “When the Predator had a Woman’s Face,” Ehrenreich argues that this predator beast was initially manifested as a “Great Goddess” devouring her victims (the devouring goddess Kali in India, she says, is a remnant of this). She proposes that this may be based on an analogy between menstrual blood and the blood shed by a predator attack. This predator goddess, she says, was eventually replaced by the “male warrior hero.” This change may have been prompted by the transition from game drives of herd animals to the stalking and pursuit of solitary prey due to the extinction of megafauna. That extinction was accompanied by a corresponding “arms revolution” where projectile weapons displaced close-quarter weapons, which she argues was accompanied by a downgrade in women’s status as hunting and the use of weapons became more male-oriented.

The Rebellion Against the Beast

But mankind did not remain the victim forever—eventually we clawed our way up to the top of the food chain. Ehrenreich describes this as “the rebellion against the beast.” The transgressive act of the prey becoming the predator, she says, was the pivotal development of human evolutionary prehistory.

Many myths and stories from around the world describe the primordial event as a confrontation between man and some kind of terrible beast or monster that must be slain. It’s so common in world mythology that it even has a name: Chaoskampf. Great heroes are often depicted as slaying ferocious beasts in legends and iconography all over the world (for example, in Beowulf). Ancient cultures featured gods that could transform into animals, or gods that were part human and part animal. Defeating wild beasts was an integral part of the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome—so much so that many wild predators around the Mediterranean were driven to extinction. Kings depicted themselves as great warriors and slayers of beasts, as in the stone friezes of Ashurbanipal depicted above.

The myths of many cultures seem to recall this rebellion as a discrete and singular event, often the slaying of a fantastic beast by a male hero/god. Perseus defeats the sea-dwelling, man-eating Gorgon. Indra defeats the monster Vrtra. Saint George battles the dragon Dajjal. In early Japanese myth, it is the storm god Susanoo no Mikito who destroys the dragon. The defeated serpent or dragon interpreted as representing the chaos “of matter still unformed and undifferentiated,” or of human societies before the imposition of hierarchies of gender and class. In the Sumerian origin myth, the hero is the god Marduk and the monster of chaos is Tiamat, his own mother, described by Joseph Campbell as “terrifying, dragon-like, attended by swarms of demons—a female personification of the original abyss itself.” (pp. 77-78)

Ehrenreich suggests that the human practice of burying the dead, which may have begun around 100,000 years ago, was part of this “rebellion” by which we denied predators and other scavengers a meal: “to bury the human dead is to cheat the beasts: to refuse, even in death, to accept the status of prey.” (p. 79) She speculates that the rebellion against the beast may have begun with common animal behaviors like “mobbing,” where smaller animals band together to ward off larger attackers. These activities may have been the precursor to game drives, where groups of hunters drove prey over game jumps and into corrals, and eventually to big-game group hunting once defensive weapons like sticks and sharpened stones became repurposed for killing.

The transition from prey to predator is commemorated in tribal rituals in which the young members of tribe are “transformed” from weak, helpless children into powerful warrior-hunters, skilled in the use of weapons. Initiation rituals, she suggests, are commemorations and reenactments of the ancient transition from prey to predator.

The great advance in human evolution, the transition from the status of prey to that of predator, must have been, at some level, an act of transgression—a rebellion against the predator beast…The transformation…in which the weak rise up against the strong, is the central “story” in the early human narrative. Some residual anxiety seems to draw us back to it again and again. We recount it in myth and ritual, as if we could never be sufficiently assured that it has, indeed, occurred… (p. 83)

Just as the entire species had to undergo the prey-to-predator transformation long ago in the Paleolithic past, so does each child undergo a version of it in the course of growing up…Most cultures have marked the transition from potential prey to potential predator with initiation rites, and those often seem to be quite vivid and literal reenactments of the primal encounter with a man-eating predator beast. (p. 84)

Myths and stories from around the world testify to humans being menaced by wild animals. Ehrenreich notes that religious rituals from around the world feature the flesh of initiates being “devoured” or otherwise terrorized by man-eating supernatural beings with animal-like characteristics, and sometimes the participants are threatened with the prospect of being slaughtered for food and eaten themselves. The Tibetan rite of tchoed features a goddess metaphorically chopping up a novice with a sword and feeding his body to hungry demons. Even places which lack large terrestrial carnivores like Australia and New Guinea feature initiation rites in which ghosts and spirits are said to “devour” the initiates. One example probably familiar to all of us are the European folk tales which became bedtime stories featuring some kind of animal—a big, bad wolf, for example—seeking to devour little children (even human witches seek to eat us), and there are countless other examples from around the world.

All of this is testament to the fact that our position at the top of nature’s hierarchy was not assured or granted to us from the start, but rather acquired over countless millennia of struggle and sacrifice against larger, stronger, and more formidable beasts then ourselves. As a result, we are simultaneously both powerful and weak; both dominant and insecure. Long after we ascended to the top of the food chain, the trauma lingered. Animals learned to fear us, but we, in turn, never learned to stop fearing them. Even well into historical times, the perennial menace of wild animals was an integral part of human cultures everywhere4.

We were not given dominion over the earth; our forebears earned it in their long nightmarish struggle against creatures far stronger, swifter, and better armed than themselves, when the terror of being ripped apart and devoured was never further away than the darkness beyond the campfire’s warmth.

If we seek an “original trauma” that shaped the human response to violence, we have no need to postulate some primordial guilt over hunting and killing. The original trauma—meaning, of course, not a single even but a long-standing condition—was the trauma of being hunted by animals, and eaten. Here, most likely, lies the source of our human habit of sacralizing violence: in the terror inspired by the devouring beast and in the powerful emotions, associated with courage and altruism, that were required for group defense. pp. 46-47

The fear of predators, fear of the dark, and the terror of being eaten is, Ehrenreich suggests, embedded into us at a deep, genetic level, although Ehrenreich cautions against carelessly invoking genetic determinism to explain human behavior in the absence of environmental factors. In the book An Instinct for Dragons, which came out after this book was published, the anthropologist David E. Jones argues that the universality of dragons in human cultures stems from our instinctual fear of predators, and that depictions of dragons in mythology are amalgams of “the principal predators of our ancestral hominids, which he names as the raptors, great cats (especially leopards) and pythons.” (Wikipedia) These archetypes, he says, are then shaped and molded by cultures at various stages of development5.

Not only were the gods beasts, but we had to transform ourselves into predator beasts in order to wage war. Belying the notion that war is somehow “natural” or innate” in us, Ehrenreich highlights the fact that warriors from cultures around the world underwent rituals in order to transform themselves from humans into something beastly, or less-than-human, when they went to war, often with the aid of altered states of consciousness or hallucinogenic drugs. When they were reintegrated back into society, warriors were transformed once again back into human beings. Even today, she notes, average people must be trained and drilled in the art of war, with boot camps serving to transform ordinary citizens into soldiers instead of initiation rites or mind-altering substances. This makes war hardly seem “natural.” As she notes, “throughout history, individual men have gone to suicidal lengths to avoid participating in wars—a fact that proponents of a warlike instinct tend to slight…Proponents of a warlike instinct must also reckon with the fact that even when men have been assembled, willingly or unwillingly, for the purpose of war, fighting is not something that seems to come ‘naturally’.”

As if to emphasize the discontinuity between the warrior and the ordinary human being, many cultures require the would-be-fighting man to leave his human-ness behind and assume a new form as an animal. The young Scandinavian had to become a bear before he could become an elite warrior, going “berserk” (the word means “dressed in a bear hide”), biting and chasing people. The Irish hero Cuchulain transformed himself into a monster in preparation for battle: “He became horrible, many-shaped, strange and unrecognizable,” with one eye sucked into his skull and the other popping out the side of his face. Apparently this transformation was a meaningful one, because similarly distorted faces turn up frequently in Celtic art.

Often the transformation is helped along with drugs or social pressure of various kinds. Tahitian warriors were browbeaten into fighting by functionaries called Rauti, or “exhorters” who ran around the battlefield urging their comrades to mimic “the devouring wild dog.” The ancient Greek hoplites drank enough wine, apparently, to be quite tipsy when they went into battle; Aztecs drank pulque; Chinese troops at the time of Sun Tzu got into the mood by drinking wine and watching “gyrating sword dancers” perform.

Almost any drug or intoxicant has served, in one setting or another, to facilitate the transformation of man into warrior. Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon ingest a hallucinogen for battle; the ancient Scythians smoked hemp, while a neighboring tribe drank something called “hamma,” which is believed to have induced a frenzy of aggression. So if there is a destructive instinct that impels men to war, it is a weak one, and often requires a great deal of help. (pp. 10-11)

Human ancestors, then, confronted the world in two radically different ways—first as the prey of larger, stronger animals, then wielding weapons in hunting bands as predators themselves. This contradictory legacy, she says, lives in on us and animates our approach to war, including the sacralization of war and violence, our lionization of self-sacrifice, group solidarity in the face of external threats, our ability to act cooperatively, the “high” experience that war gives us, and the depiction of enemies as threatening animals and something less than human.

A Rough Male Sport

Some scholars posit an innate “instinct” for war going back to the very beginning using chimpanzees as an example. Those who like to portray prehistory as a neverending bloodbath point to signs of warfare predating farming and civilization to supposedly “prove” that we are “hard-wired” for conflict, usually citing Lawrence Keely’s War Before Civilization as evidence.

However, while there was indeed war before civilization, there is no evidence of warfare before the Mesolithic period. Ehrenreich points out that this timeline coincides exactly with the mass extinction of the planet’s megafauna which we had specialized in hunting. Even Keeley’s book has no solid evidence of warfare before this time, indicating that it may not be so hard-wired after all.

It seemed as though mankind’s mortal enemy had been vanquished once and for all once large predators began disappearing one-by-one during the Mesolithic, possibly due to competition or predation from ourselves alongside climate change. This loss had a profound effect. Ehrenreich notes that hunting was probably just as much about ritual as it was about obtaining protein. Hunter-defenders now lacked purpose, either defending the tribe from ravenous beasts or bringing them home for dinner. Some have speculated that redundant male hunters transferred their energies to things like war-making; in fact, war and manhood have often been connected. To go to war, she notes, has often been a rite of passage in many cultures, the mark of a “real man.”

With the external threat gone, humans began to prey on each other, as they still do today.

In a scenario first suggested (as far as I can tell) by Lewis Mumford, there is a direct continuity of personnel between the male hunting sub-band and the first warrior bands. The earliest warriors we know through recorded literature, the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu, were not only warriors but hunters and battlers of killer beasts. So, as mentioned earlier, were the Greek chieftains who fought at Troy. In their homelands, in times of peace, they had battled lions and wild boars…

With the decline of wild predator and game populations, there would have been little to occupy the males who had specialized in hunting and anti-predator defense, and no well-trodden route toward the status of “hero.” What saved the hunter-defender from obsolescence of a life of agricultural toil was the fact that he possessed weapons and the skills to use them. Mumford suggests that the hunter-defender preserved his status by turning to a kind of “protection racket”: pay him (with food and social standing) or be subject to his predations.

Eventually, the presence of underemployed hunter-defenders in other human settlements guaranteed a new and “foreign” menace to defend against. The hunter-defenders of one band or settlement could justify their upkeep by pointing to the threat posed by their counterparts in other groups, and the danger could always be made more vivid by staging a raid from time to time. As Gwynne Dyer observes in his survey of war, “pre-civilized warfare…was predominantly a rough male sport for underemployed hunters.” (pp. 123-124)

“Civilized” warfare, then, is probably a transference of humanity’s central conflict from fighting a hostile, indifferent nature toward fighting each other. Tribal peoples recognized only their own people as truly “human” and other tribes as different species of animal, which is reflected in our languages. She refers to Andrew Bard Schmookler’s Parable of the Tribes—once a tribe turns its efforts toward warfare and conquest, neighboring tribes have only a few options. One is to flee, if there’s anywhere left to go. Another is to surrender, which results in either extinction or incorporation into the more warlike tribe. Finally, they can resist the hostile tribe, in which case they too adopt the customs and culture of war, causing warfare to invariably spread and more placid cultures to be pushed to the margins.

In other words, as it spreads from place to place, war tends to stamp a certain sameness on human cultures. At the most obvious level, it requires that each human society be as war ready as the other societies it is likely to encounter; that spears be matched with spears, fighting men matched with the men of potential enemy groups; and that in all groups, similar proportions of energy and resources be dedicated to destructive ends.

No doubt there are other directions in which human cultures might have evolved—toward greater emphasis on the arts, for example, or philosophy, or more lighthearted games and rituals. But war, once chosen by some, quickly became the “unchosen direction” imposed on all. (p. 134)

While the ultimate origin and reasons for war may be unknowable, in her final chapter, Ehrenreich notes that, “The aim of the book was not explain the existence of war but, more modestly, to understand the uniquely ‘religious’ feelings humans bring to it.” (p. 232). To this end, I think she has succeeded. She notes, however, that war itself is not dependent on these religious feelings and passions, as they could just as easily be channeled into things more noble and productive, something that is, in effect, “the moral equivalent of war.” War need not be waged with heroic or noble sentiments, and often has not been. It is routinely waged, she notes, by ants.

We are deceived, she says, by the linkage of war to human institutions like hierarchies of race, gender or class, or by economic and political goals. Instead, she says, war should be seen as something, in effect, with a life of its own, similar to other sorts of viral social and cultural phenomena. That is, it is a self reproducing cultural entity, or meme. An example she lists are markets, which are created and established by human interactions but seem to have their own desires and agency apart from the people who created them. Markets are entirely human creations, yet we seem to be hopelessly under their control much more than they are under ours.

Humans invented market systems and bring strong feelings to them—greed, most notably, but also the desire for adventure and sometimes even altruistic concerns for the general welfare. But, once under way, they have a dynamism of their own, which no socialist enclave has yet found a way to resist for any length of time. The market comes to act as a force of nature, dictating—or at least severely circumscribing—the choices of anyone who hopes to remain a “player.” This outcome would seem to fit Andrew Bard Schmookler’s observation that “with the rise of civilization human creativity ceased to drive the mill of cultural evolution but rather became its grist.” (p. 236)

War, she concludes is similar. Humans are the means that war uses to propagate itself. That is, war is a parasite on humanity. War has a life of its own, and while humans may have won their primordial battle against the beasts of this planet who sought to devour us a long time ago, war is a new kind of predator that may ultimately succeed where those ancient beasts failed:

To return to the question I posed at the beginning of this section, what is war that exerts such cruel demands on us? It is first, in an economic sense, a parasite on human cultures—draining them of the funds and resources, talent and personnel, that could be used to advance the cause of human life and culture. But “parasitism” is too mild a term for a relationship predicated on the periodic killing of large numbers of human beings. If war is a “living” thing, it is a kind of creature that, by its very nature, devours us, To look at war, carefully and long enough, is to see the face of the predator over which we thought we had triumphed long ago. (p. 238)

Conclusion

I have to admit that I had not heard of the defense hypothesis before, but once you do, a lot of things fall into place. One thing I found especially intriguing is that it provides an explanation for humans’ extraordinary capacity for self-sacrifice. Ever since “The Selfish Gene,” people have tried to explain why people sacrifice themselves for others, even for total strangers. It makes perfect sense that ancestral groups with members willing to sacrifice themselves for the safety of the group were the ones that survived and passed along their genes, and that the capacity for self-sacrifice was selected for by the differential survival of those groups in the distant past.

I don’t think the hunting hypothesis is entirely invalid, however. Rather, I think the integration of both the defense hypothesis and the hunting hypothesis together is a powerful tool for explaining much of human behavior, including war and religion, as Ehrenreich has done here. Looking at either one in isolation is probably less valuable.

The war correspondent and author Sebastian Junger spent a lot of time embedded with various fighting units. In the end, he concluded that was motivated them to fight was not hated of the enemy, but rather, according to him, “love.” Love for the fellow soldiers in one’s unit, which was deeper than anything encountered in civilian life. Furthermore, he noted that the soldiers who experienced the worst cases of PTSD were not the ones who had seen the most bloodshed, or been involved in the most harrowing battles. Instead, it was those who returned to competitive, individualistic societies where one felt atomized, alone and alienated, with no one else to relate to after the fighting ended.

Even today in popular war dramas, what we watch is not the drone operator managing a console, or the bomber dropping ordinance on faceless civilians below, or the logistics officer filling out paperwork, even though those activities are what constitute the vast majority of modern warfare today. Instead, we tune in to watch the Band of Brothers, the Platoon, the field hospital, and the elite special forces units confronting the enemy face-to-face—men and women under the most extreme circumstances imaginable “sacrificing” themselves for a “greater cause.” Even today would-be demagogues and dictators acquire power by rallying people to face an external threat (e.g. Muslims, terrorists) or against internal scapegoats who must be “sacrificed” to purify society and restore order (e.g. Jews, immigrants). This book helps explain why that is.

So, why did inflation come back with a vengeance after the pandemic?

Blyth and Fraccaroli examine four common arguments for why inflation returned at such high levels after the pandemic, why it persisted, and why it eventually came back down again. They use this as a lens to examine various theories behind why inflation occurs. Some arguments they find compelling, other less so.

1. It was the stimulus checks

This view is particularly common on the internet which is dominated by libertarians. This is often leveled as a criticism of the Biden administration, despite the fact that it was Trump—not Biden—who sent out the first stimulus checks during his first term, the entirety of which seems to have disappeared down the memory hole due to some kind of collective amnesia.

But were the stimulus checks truly the cause of inflation? Blyth and Fraccaroli point out that there are several reasons to be skeptical of this narrative.

The first, and most obvious, is that inflation was a worldwide phenomenon and was not confined to the United States. Thirty countries around the world experienced high post-pandemic inflation, but only one of those—the United States—received stimulus checks from either Trump or Biden. Thus, it’s hard to blame the stimulus checks for an inflation which affected the entire world.

Second, if government stimulus were the primary cause of inflation, we would expect to see a clear relationship between the amount of stimulus provided by governments to their citizens and the inflation rate. We see no such correlation. In fact, in many cases, it’s the opposite. Countries like Germany, which did less stimulus than the United States, experienced higher rates of post-pandemic inflation indicating that some other factors must be at play. Inflation in the United States was relatively modest compared to many other countries.

Third, if inflation were caused by the stimulus checks, we would expect it to fade fairly quickly as the checks were either saved or spent. Yet inflation persisted for a long time after the checks were sent out—several years, in fact. It’s hard to reconcile people running out and immediately spending their checks on enough goods to drive up inflation, while at the same time saving their checks in bank accounts that kept inflation elevated for years thereafter. As the authors point out, the checks were simultaneously blamed for both high spending during the pandemic and high savings after the pandemic—a logical contradiction.

If inflation is caused by the stimulus, then we would expect inflation to fade quite quickly as the short-term impact of fiscal expansion dissipates. This would require no specific action as the stimulus in the United States was inherently temporary and time-limited. What went up must come down… (p. 69)

…Finally, the timing doesn’t add up. The checks seem to have been spent in 2022 but also show up as so-called excess savings in late 2023 to explain why consumption in the United States remains robust despite high interest rates. But these are not Schrodinger’s checks. They cannot simultaneously be spent in one period as stimulus and remain unspent in another future period as savings. That simply makes no sense… (p. 71)

It also matters what the checks were spent on. Data on consumer credit from the New York Federal Reserve shows that there was a massive reduction in consumer credit card debt after the checks were sent out. In fact, it was the largest single reduction of credit card debt ever recorded. Based on this, they estimate that 20 percent of the stimulus checks were used to pay down credit cards. There was also a reduction in mortgage delinquencies, indicating that the checks were also being used to pay overdue mortgages. It should be obvious why paying down debt cannot be a driver of inflation. Finally, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey in August 2020, sixty-six percent of recipients reported using some portion of their stimulus checks to buy food—hardly a luxury good.

In sum, despite many sensational media stories about the checks being spent on bitcoin and gambling, most Americans seemed to buy financial peace of mind by paying back debt, or buying food, instead of increasing their consumption, all of which is inherently non-stimulatory. (p. 71)

Fourth is the size of the stimulus. While the headline amount seems massive, it pales in comparison to the amount of economic activity lost during the pandemic. For the stimulus to be inflationary, it would have to larger than the trillions of dollars of economic activity which vanished overnight when businesses closed, factories shut down, and nonessential workers were told to stay home.

The authors point out that the handouts given out by the federal government to compensate for lost income—both unemployment benefits and stimulus checks—were less than the income these same workers would have received had they continued to go to work as usual. Much of the stimulus that went directly into workers’ pockets came in the form of unemployment compensation. By definition, unemployment compensation replaces the income lost from not working—it does not supplement it. Moreover, by design, unemployment checks are lower than one’s regular salary, with the expectation that people will “tighten their belts” in the event of job loss and to make sure that not working doesn’t pay more than working. Thus, by definition, this portion of the stimulus could not have caused increased consumer demand—it can only have decreased it.

The remainder of the stimulus came in the form of checks sent out directly to households earning under $150,000 and individuals earning less than $75,000. The authors point out that the total amount of the stimulus checks amounted to only 4 percent of the median household income in the United States, although, of course, it was a higher percentage for those making less than that. Nonetheless, it’s unlikely that this was greater than the income lost by shutting down the entire economy during the pandemic. As we’ve already seen, a big portion apparently went to food and credit card debt, which was probably more likely for those lower down the income scale. While the checks might have kept demand high for items that had vanished from the shelves due to supply chain bottlenecks, they did not in and of themselves cause higher inflation—the supply chain bottlenecks did. Plus, we have no way of knowing how much worse things would have been had the government not tried to stimulate the economy. While inflation may be bad, an economic collapse would have been even worse.

…while the headline figure of US spending during the COVID-19 crisis sounds extremely large ($5 trillion or 25 percent of GDP), that needs to be put into perspective. The COVID-19 crisis shut down large parts of the world’s largest economy—especially its service sector which is 80 percent of the economy—for an indefinite period. As such, COVID-19 spending should properly be thought of as compensating for the loss of income and output generated during the shutdown, rather than as a stimulus that was added to an already fully employed economy.

For example, if one examines the bit of the stimulus program that gets the most blame in such analyses, the direct cash transfers component of US spending, you will find that $1.8 trillion of the $5 trillion went to individuals and families. Of that $1.8 trillion, $653 billion went to unemployment benefits, which were in many (but not all) cases, less than the wages they were replacing. As such, unemployment benefits, by definition, could not be stimulatory. Rather, they partially compensated for the spending that usually would have been there.

That leaves $817 billion, which was paid out in three waves of stimulus checks over an eleven-month period that ran from April 2020 to March 2021. Family households with an income of under $150,000 per year and individuals with an income of under $75,000 received three income replacement checks of $1,200, $600, and $1,400 respectively, for a total of $3,200 per household. When we consider that median family income in the United States in 2021 was just under $80,000, these combined stimulus checks added the equivalent of 4 percent to that median income…if those payments were less than the income lost by COVID-19, it’s very hard to see how they could be stimulatory in any strong sense of the word. Surely there were supply constraints, perhaps driven by stimulus-enabled spending, that pushed prices up. But if we imagine a counterfactual where no checks were spent, would we have predicted a mild recession with 80 percent of the economy in lockdown? (pp. 69-70, my emphasis)

A prominent study came out from the Federal Reserve of San Francisco which argued that the stimulus led to prices that were 3 percent higher than they otherwise would be. This was immediately seized upon by the proponents of the “too much money” hypothesis. But Blyth and Fraccaroli point out that the authors of the study themselves note that their estimates are too uncertain to be taken as established fact. In the end, there is no solid evidence that the checks caused inflation with a high degree of certainty.

So the idea that “[Biden’s] stimulus checks” were to blame for inflation doesn’t seem to hold up to scrutiny. This view is peddled by the usual suspects who want to make sure the government never spends any money on average citizens, and only showers money on billionaires and private corporations which is somehow never inflationary.

2. The problem is too much employment

This is basically a variant of the wage-price spiral story from the 1970s based on the Phillips curve logic encountered earlier. The argument is that “greedy” workers are demanding “too much money” from their employers, driving up inflation. The solution, then, as persistently argued by Democratic economic advisor Larry Summers (read that again: Democratic1) was to engineer a recession and create mass unemployment to bring inflation down.

This view is based on the conventional story of what happened in the nineteen-seventies, which we described in part one. It’s no surprise that business and employers love this narrative, because it punishes labor and gives more power to employers.

But, as the authors point out, labor’s back has been broken since the Volcker shock of the 1980s. Workers simply don’t have the bargaining power relative to capital they had back then, so are unable to push up wages enough to drive inflation. In fact, during the pandemic, real wages were down relative to inflation. They also point out that, for this theory to work, workers must have no “money illusion.”

The “money illusion” is a term economists use for the fact that people look at the salary number on their paycheck or W-2 form and not what those wages are actually able to buy. In economic terms, nominal wages is the number on your paycheck, while real wages are what those paychecks are able to purchase in the economy. So, for example, if you receive a 2 percent raise, you think you’re earning more than before. However, if the inflation rate is 3 percent, you’ve effectively just taken a pay cut, but people tend not to realize that. That’s the money illusion2.

But in order for inflation to be caused by rising wages, workers must somehow know what the inflation rate is going to be and bargain for wages even higher than the future inflation rate. But that’s not what people do. They negotiate for an increased number—say 2 percent, or $5000 more per year—without knowing what the inflation rate is going to be over the next year. So how then can wages be the driver of inflation?

A very odd but seldom commented upon thing about the Phillips curve story is that for it to work, workers must have no money illusion about wages—they seem to know and bargain for the real wage, which causes the wage-price spiral—but they must have a permanent money illusion about all other prices.

After all, if they knew that all those other price increases were simply nominal adjustments, why would they ever get caught up in that wage-price spiral? Instead, the rational thing to do would be not to adjust to prices going up by asking for more, and, if the Phillips curve logic is right, prices would fall all by themselves. So, for this story to hold water, workers need to be able to bargain for their real wage while being quite schizophrenic regarding prices. That’s really odd when you think about it. (pp. 75-76)

But the biggest refutation is simply that fact that inflation has continued to come down even as unemployment remained at historic lows. In fact, recent research on the Phillips curve has shown it to pretty much nonsense, just like all of Milton Friedman’s other ideas—contrived for political reasons and nothing else.

Research during that lost decade after the financial crisis began to suggest that the modern version of Friedman’s natural rate of unemployment, the so-called NAIRU (the Non-accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment), was actually a statistical chimera insofar as individual countries’ NAURUs jumped around far too much and over too short a period to be considered either “real” or an actual “speed limit” for the economy.

Likewise, research on the Philips curve suggested that it had either vanished or had become horizontal over the prior twenty years as countries seemed to experience wildly different rates of employment with more or less the same very low rates of inflation, independent of their monetary policy stances and central bank constitutions. (p. 157)

3. Inflation is transitory

In this theory, inflation was caused by a series of supply shocks caused by, you know, shutting down the entire global economy! Other supply shocks included crop failures and the war in Ukraine, reminiscent of the alternative view of the 1970s we talked about last time3. According to proponents of this view, once the economy adjusts to the supply shocks, the inflation rate will gradually come back down, regardless of the actions of the central banks. In fact, raising interest rates might make the situation worse, since it makes it harder to invest in additional productive capacity which would ease the shortages.

This was the view adopted by proponents of MMT, for example. While MMT acknowledges that excessive money creation in an overheated economy can be a driver of inflation, it tends to see inflation as resulting from imbalances in supply and demand which can come from either the demand side (caused by, for example, rising wages or tax cuts) or the supply side (not enough supply, for example, due to closed factories, crop failures, or supply chain snarls). It’s important to remember that, as we noted previously, “transitory” is not the same thing as “short-lived.” It simply means that the fundamental factors that are causing inflation must be worked through, and the money supply may not necessarily be one of them.

The authors seem to be amenable to this view, but they point out a flaw in its reasoning. In the conventional explanation, transitory supply shocks do not cause inflation because people expect them to be transitory. As such, they do not bargain for higher wages or run out and buy a bunch of stuff because they expect it to cost more tomorrow. But how do they know whether inflation will be transitory or not?

The argument is that consumers are either smart enough to see the big picture about inflation, or they trust authorities to know how to manage it so they remain unperturbed even in the face of rising prices. But the authors point out a host of studies which show that neither of these things are true. In other words, this theory relies on “expectations” just as much as the conventional explanation for inflation—just in the opposite direction!

Blyth and Fraccaroli are skeptical that “expectations” pay much of a role at all when it comes to inflation, either causing or preventing it.

…it seems that especially in the United States, the economy and employment have both grown while interest rates were increased, and yet expectations remained steady. This…does not accord with the theory that inflation is caused by a de-anchoring of people’s expectations of future price movements… (p. 18)

4. It was greedy corporations

Throughout the pandemic’s aftermath, the mainstream media tried to gaslight us into believing that corporations were not using the pandemic as an excuse to raise their prices. “Corporations have always been greedy!” went the mantra. This was universally endorsed by economists, the business press, the vast right-wing media, and, predictably, by “abundance liberals” like Ezra Klein and Noah Smith, who lectured us that big business and corporations were not the villains, but rather victims just like the rest of us. They pointed to the low profit margins of grocery stores, apparently oblivious to the monopolization of the producers and supply chains which brought those goods to our shelves.

In this view, although “corporations have always been greedy,” what was different this time was that price increases due to the COVID-19 supply shock caused people to lose their benchmark of what a fair price should be, since it was impossible to tell which prices were rising due to genuinely higher costs and which were rising due to opportunistic price-gouging. And since everyone was raising their prices at the same time, there was no real way to tell what items “should” cost, providing cover for those who wished to raise their margins.

Evidence in support of this perspective is quite plentiful but is always contested by mainstream economists. Isabella Weber was one of the first to propose the idea that inflation was driven by profits. In her study with Evan Wasner they showed that in the United States, firms’ profits accounted for 9.4 percent of the increase in inflation (measured with the GDP deflator) since the third quarter of 2020, while wages accounted for only 4.7 percent.

Carsten Jung and Chris Hayes find similar results for Brazil, Germany, South Africa, the UK, and the US. Both studies agree that the concentration of market power among firms acted as an inflation amplifier. By one account, in 2022, the profits of the average US firm increased by 49 percent since the beginning of inflation in 2021. Matt Stoller, research director of the American Economic Liberties Project, analyzed these margin changes in depth and observed something interesting. While corporate profits remained stable from 2012 to 2019, they saw incredible growth in 2020-21. Based on his estimates, increases in corporate profits have cost the average US citizen $2,126.

An even more striking price of evidence is to be found in a survey conducted by Digital.com in November 2021. According to this study, 56 percent of retail businesses acknowledged during earnings calls (when corporate CFOs and CEO get on the phone to their investors before they announce their earnings to the markets) that inflation gave them the ability to raise prices far beyond what they would have needed to offset higher production costs. As a result, on average, firms increased their prices by around 20 percent. As the simple economics story would predict, this was particularly true for larger companies in concentrated markets with automobiles and e-commerce at the top of the list. This is hardly fringe opinion. The European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s own research has given us clear evidence that firms’ growing profits fueled inflation in Europe…

According to this view, inflation is higher in the United States than in Europe not because of the higher fiscal stimulus (as the first genre maintains), or because of the peculiarities of the labor market (genre two), or global supply shocks (genre three), but simply because the American economy is more concentrated, and a handful of firms in critical sectors can set prices because they don’t face significant competition and the government does not enforce antitrust laws. Why does this occur? Well, given that those firms are critical funders of those hugely expensive US elections that elect the folks who regulate those firms, one does not have to go far to see a conflict of interest at work here. (pp.87-89, my emphasis)

A 2025 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St, Louis asked, “What’s Driving the Surge in U.S Corporate Profits?” According to their findings:

Corporate profits have been elevated since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As of the last quarter of 2024, they were $4 trillion—2.3 percentage points higher as a fraction of national income than they were prior to the pandemic.

The increase was entirely driven by domestic nonfinancial industries. Notably, retail and wholesale trade, construction, manufacturing and health care experienced a marked increase in profitability. Higher corporate profits mostly went to rewarding shareholders via higher dividends.

What’s Driving the Surge in U.S. Corporate Profits? (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis)

Why is all of this research and evidence ignored and suppressed by economists and the mainstream corporate media? According to Blyth and Fraccaroli, the reason is because the solutions would be rather inconvenient for the rich and powerful. They prefer the “stimulus” narrative, because it implies that government spending on ordinary citizens causes inflation. They like the “greedy workers” narrative, because it increases the power of capital versus labor. The preferred solution—causing a recession by raising interest rates—increases unemployment which lowers workers’ bargaining power. It also reduces prices for financial assets, which can be bought up on the cheap. Furthermore, it allows banks to raise interest rates, allowing them to make higher profits on loans, and allows the investor class to earn more on their investments like ownership of the national debt (i.e. Treasury bills).

By contrast, if rising prices were caused by corporate price gouging, then raising interest rates will just make inflation worse, because corporations will pass along the increased costs to consumers. The obvious solution in this case would be either price controls or a windfall profits tax. The other obvious solution would be to break up the monopolies and oligopolies that control virtually every sector of the modern US economy.

…as Thomas Philippon has shown for the United States and Brett Christophers has shown for the UK, the “effective” number of firms across many sectors in both countries has fallen significantly, which makes oligopoly pricing more stable and more profitable4. For example, take the US airline sector—battered by COVID-19, hideously indebted, reluctantly bailed out by taxpayers, and loathed by consumers. Its effective number of firms is four. American, Delta, Southwest, and United collectively control 66 percent of the market. In 2023 prices are higher than ever…(p. 87)

In fact, the Biden administration’s robust antitrust enforcement appears to be a major reason why so many in the business community threw their support behind Trump over Kamala Harris. Some of them even admitted this openly. We’ve already seen how many corporations undergoing major mergers have capitulated to Trump’s demands and showered him with what are effectively bribes to grease the merger process.

Bringing it all together then, the evidence indicates that supply shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, failed harvests around the world caused by climate change, and higher energy prices due to the war in Ukraine (especially for Europe), caused prices to spike which acted as a smokescreen for corporations to price-gouge the public, since most of them now operate in highly concentrated markets thanks to several decades of neoliberalism and lax (or nonexistent) antitrust enforcement.

Corporations, politicians, and the media then blamed government spending and deficits for inflation, calling for mass unemployment and a painful recession to bring inflation back down (while still keeping their prices high). Despite a few modest interest rate hikes (which were actually lower than the inflation rate, meaning they were effectively negative), inflation started coming down on its own, at least until the current political regime came to power. This is the “supply-shock plus price-gouging explanation” of inflation, which appears to be the correct one.

5. What about the future?

While inflation has come down significantly in the years since the pandemic, there is evidence that it’s not going away. Blyth and Fraccaroli ponder whether the future is going to offer yet more inflation, or whether we will enter another Great Moderation.

The argument for deflation is that, as noted previously, deflation is the norm for capitalist economies rather than inflation.

Think, for example, of the cost of buying a car over time Imagine a 1979 Volkswagen Golf GTI. Its original price at its UK launch was £4,705, which was $9,536 in 1979 dollars. It was a fabulous car, but it didn’t have airbags, ABS, Bluetooth, navigation, or even air conditioning. The current version of the GTI is superior in every way possible to the 1979 model and costs $29,880. But when you adjust the price of the 1979 model, that is, you price 1979 dollars as 2022 dollars, that translates to $41,370 of purchasing power today. (p. 191)

The other argument is rather more depressing—workers are just too poor and beaten-down nowadays to cause any sort of wage-driven inflation for the foreseeable future. They point out that, in the modern economy, the top-tier corporations make huge profits from ownership of monopoly or quasi-monopoly rights to digital platforms or highly specific intellectual property, but employ relatively few people. Middle-tier companies supply the top-tier companies. But below them, most firms have become franchises that can only make profits by squeezing labor. This limits investment opportunities, because most people and companies have little to spend and are just struggling to get by. As I’ve pointed out before, in the United States, fully half of consumption is now driven by just the top 10 percent of earners, with the bottom half barely registering at all—essentially economic NPCs.

In such a world, inflation can only come from external supply shocks and can only be temporary. There is simply not enough demand in the system to get excited about inflation. (p. 193)

But ultimately, despite this, Blyth and Fraccaroli conclude that the future is going to be inflationary.

The first driver is climate change. The warnings from the world’s climate scientists are becoming increasingly dire, and analysts are starting to take notice. While William Nordhaus famously predicted that climate change effects on the global economy will be minimal because we all work indoors now (seriously!), other analysts are less sanguine. An analysis by the Potsdam Institute found that climate change will raise food prices by 0.92 to 3.23 percent every year, and headline inflation (which includes food prices) will rise between 0.32 and 1.18 percent every year, year after year.

The second driver is geopolitical competition. The globalization that brought prices down and kept them down throughout the Great Moderation is now coming to an end. Simply put, the world is “deglobalizing.” The ability of China to supply an endless cornucopia of cheap goods to the world’s industrial nations has reached its limit. Competition for things like rare earth minerals is going up, causing geopolitical tensions. Every country wants to be a net exporter, but very few want to be net importers, which is obviously impossible. The departure of Britain from the EU shows that countries will voluntarily deglobalize, even at an economic cost to them. The current US administration sees a trade deficit of any sort as being taken advantage of (i.e. a “ripoff”), and is currently engaged in a trade war with the entire world (which happened after the book was published). Free trade is dead.

The third driver is demographics. The world is getting older. The Baby Boomers increased inflation while they were young, but decreased it by 5 percentage points when they entered the workforce from 1975 to 1990 due to their sheer numbers. As they depart the workforce, the cohort replacing them will be smaller, driving inflation up, and this is before any worker shortages that may materialize. The “youth bulge” which added billions of low-wage workers to the global economy from 1981 to 2008 has run its course. Future generations will be much smaller and wealthier, meaning there is less cheap labor to exploit for industrial economies.

Finally, energy prices are going up. The demand for artificial intelligence is already causing electricity prices to skyrocket, while it’s dubious how much economic benefit AI will confer to anyone besides a narrow investor class. The authors do not talk much about fossil fuels (they are economists, after all, not petroleum geologists), but they say it is likely that shortages of fossil fuels will act a bottleneck for economic growth in the future. If some of the more scary predictions of petroleum depletion turn out to be correct (as I’ve suggested), then this will be significant source of inflationary pressure going forward.

All of this suggests to us that inflation may be baked into the DNA of the emergent macroeconomic regime. We may lack a word for it, but we are surely entering a world that is quite different from the world of relatively stable prices we were used to. The green transition—despite how slowly it’s happening and recent backsliding—China’s changing role in the world economy, a new geopolitics of manufacturing, and the aging populations of the Western world (and some Eastern worlds) are all shaping this new macroeconomy…Our hunch is that there is a good chance we are going to see more of inflation in the future, and we hope that this book has provided you with the tools to understand who’s going to win, lose, use, and abuse inflation in that new world. (p. 198)

Last time we looked at the conventional view of what happened during the 1970s. In that story, high inflation was caused by “expectations” and a “wage-price spiral.” The thing that ultimately ended it was the “Volcker shock” in the late nineteen-seventies, which finally brought inflation down. Ever since then, independent central banks and inflation targeting have kept inflation low. But is that really the case?

The Alternative Story

According to the alternative story, the high inflation of the 1970s was not caused simply because people expected inflation to be high. Nor was it because of COLA contracts. While the wage-price spiral did contribute to inflation’s persistence, it did not cause it. Rather, inflation was caused by a series of “shocks” that, when combined, caused inflation to rise. To phase it differently, a series of “black swans” hit the global economy in the 1970s which had not occurred before then. What were those black swans? The biggest ones were food and energy.

According to Blyth and Fraccaroli, the initial roots of inflation trace back to the Johnson administration. President Lyndon Johnson wanted to implement his “Great Society” programs domestically, while at the same time prosecuting the Cold War abroad and ramping up US military spending in Vietnam, and he wanted to do it all without raising taxes.

Economists have a saying about “guns and butter,” meaning there is generally a tradeoff between domestic spending and military spending. A wartime economy is widely understood to be inflationary because increased government spending is not accompanied by a concurrent expansion of domestic production. Instead, domestic production is devoted to the war effort meaning things like tanks, ships, planes, jeeps, rockets, guns, ammunition, uniforms and the like, most of which does not end up in civilian hands and much of which gets shipped around the world and destroyed. During World War Two, a number of strategies were implemented to keep inflation in check such as the sale of war bonds, the rationing of goods, and price controls. The wartime American economy was effectively centrally controlled and managed by the federal government during World War Two and for several years thereafter. Not so in the late 1960s, and inflation started to creep upward.

According to this alternative view, the core problem of inflation of the 1960s and ‘70s lay in the inability of the Johnson administration to raise taxes to pay for the Vietnam war. Knowing that doing so would cause Congress to choose between guns—the war in Vietnam—and butter—the war on poverty at home—and that Congress would choose to fund the former by cutting the latter, Johnson chose to fight the war “off the books.” As a result, the administration’s economic projections of a slowdown in inflation in the mid-1960s failed to happen as actual war expenditures far exceeded what was being admitted…

The Johnson administration’s inflation control policy consisted of a set of wage and price guideposts for business and labor, inherited from the Kennedy administration, to coordinate their bargaining. As these guideposts were voluntary and lacked statutory authority, they were worthless as an anti-inflationary tool. Vietnam drove inflation from the demand side. There really was too much (war) money chasing too few goods. (pp. 140-141)

President Johnson chose not to run for reelection in 1968 and the presidency went to Republican Richard Nixon. Nixon continued, and even accelerated, his predecessor’s war in Vietnam while maintaining high domestic spending at home. Inflation continued to rise, so Nixon put price controls in place in 1971 to try and contain rising inflation.

In what’s sure to be one of the most controversial takes in the book, Blyth and Fraccaroli argue that price controls worked. When they were introduced in August of 1971, they brought inflation down, just as they were intended to do. Later in the book they document many other instances where price controls have successfully contained inflation.

According to Blyth and Fraccaroli, what caused price controls to fail wasn’t their lack of effectiveness. Rather, what caused them to fail was that they were implemented in three phases, the third of which was a relaxation of mandatory price controls and the introduction of voluntary ones in 1973. However, producers ignored these voluntary controls and hiked their prices to compensate for the years when price controls were in place—in effect “back loading” inflation.

What’s missing in the official history is that the phase two controls actually worked. Core inflation rapidly fell from over 6 percent in late 1970 to 2.8 percent in the summer of 1972, and that’s when Nixon made a political mistake by trying to get angry Republicans off his back.

As we noted before, given this success in controlling inflation by mandatory controls, Nixon made the third phase of control voluntary. As we saw with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ earlier experiences with voluntary “guidelines,” both business and labor blew right through them…Making controls voluntary meant that by the summer of 1973, meat prices had risen by one-third while the stock market fell. (pp. 142-143, emphasis in original)

But what really added fuel to the fire were two major factors: the cost of food and energy. While it’s commonly believed that the Great Inflation lasted throughout the nineteen-seventies, in fact there were really only two periods of sustained high inflation during the decade: from 1973-74, and from 1978-80.

There was a failed harvest around the world in 1973 which caused food prices to rise 29 percent. But the big story here was obviously energy. Blyth and Fraccaroli do not dive much into the history of oil, which is understandable (this is an economics book, after all), but I think a little history is in order.

OPEC was the brainchild of a Venezuelan official named Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso. Alfonso had studied in the United States where he became acquainted with the Texas Railroad Commission. The Railroad Commission was part of the Interstate Oil Compact Commission which had been established in 1935 to regulate oil production. The Commission set limits on production in order to keep prices high, ostensibly to protect smaller producers from being undercut by the big oil companies.

The United States had long been the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil, but consumption started to outrun production around 1970. The petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert argued in the 1950s that oil production for entire nations followed basically the same trajectory as that of individual wells: they would reach a maximum output followed by a gradual decline thereafter, with a steeper falloff as time went on. This bell-curve model of oil production became known as “Hubbert’s Peak” based on his findings. Hubbert predicated the peak of US conventional oil production around 1970 and in retrospect, Hubbert turned out to be correct1.

Alfonso realized that if oil producing states could form a cartel and limit the supply, they could raise the price of oil and extract more money from oil-consuming industrial nations as a result. At the Arab Congress in Cairo in 1959, he was introduced to the Saudi oil minister Abdullah Tariki, and out of that encounter OPEC was born in 1960. Over the next decade a bunch of additional nations joined such that by nineteen-seventy, OPEC members controlled half the world’s oil production.

By the early 1970s, oil markets were tight, prompting a wave of nationalizations. Previously, it was thought that nationalizing oil production would cause oil prices to fall, but tight markets and the power of OPEC allayed these concerns. Then, in 1973, OPEC flexed their muscles. Oil production was severely curtailed, causing the price of oil to skyrocket. The Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) exacerbated the situation by issuing an embargo against selling oil to the United States and the Netherlands which had backed Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Imported crude oil prices quadrupled within the span of a few months, creating the First Oil Crisis. This, combined with rising food prices and the end of mandatory price controls caused inflation to spike to double-digits in 1973. The economy subsequently fell into recession during 1974-75.

Another factor was the increasing participation of women and minorities in the workforce starting in the 1960s, often called the “quiet revolution.” Women had been told to “step aside” for men returning from the war when it came to jobs. No longer. The introduction of birth control caused birth rates to fall off a cliff after 1973 which allowed women to get married later, and this, along with rising divorce rates, meant that there were more single women in the workforce than before. Many married women worked part time to earn money as well, meaning that there was more consumption without additional household formation. While it’s a myth that women couldn’t open a checking account without their husband’s permission, the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act allowed women to obtain credit in their own name regardless of their marital status unless it was a joint application, including the newest financial innovation—the credit card.

The Nixon administration closed the “gold window” in 1971 and the US went off the gold standard permanently in 1973. This caused a devaluation of the dollar making imports more expensive, including oil imports. While there are a lot of conspiracy theories about this, the truth is that the US simply did not have nearly enough gold in its vaults to cover all the dollars in existence in the world’s banks. By this time US manufacturing dominance had been whittled away, particularly by Japan and Germany. This meant that the United States had a much smaller share of global trade than they had after the war. The pegging of the dollar to gold under the Bretton Woods agreement meant that the US dollar was severely overvalued by the 1970s, hurting American manufacturers and causing all sorts of knock-on effects. Basically, due to changing circumstances, the US could no longer afford to keep up the commitments it had made in the aftermath of the war thirty years earlier.

From 1977 to 1980, inflation spiked again, driven by some of the same factors. There was once again a failed harvest due to severe weather conditions, combined with an oil price shock, this time caused by the Iranian Revolution. Food prices rose 22 percent led by rising meat prices due to a drastic reduction in cattle herds. On a dollars per barrel basis, this shock was greater than the 1973-74 OPEC oil shock, though on a percentage basis the earlier shock was larger.

An additional factor in the late nineteen seventies was the decision to include mortgage interest rates in the major inflation indexes. When mortgage interest rates increased in 1979, this alone raised the “official” interest rate by several points. This leads to a larger discussion of how the inflation rate is measured, and what’s included in inflation indexes (and what isn’t). This is the subject of the second chapter of the book, however, unlike the authors, I’ve chosen to postpone this discussion until later. Suffice to say, the way inflation is measured matters a great deal.

Volcker’s predecessors at the Fed knew that these factors were uncontrollable and couldn’t be solved by manipulating interest rates which could make the situation even worse. Bankers didn’t control the weather. Bankers didn’t control OPEC. Bankers didn’t control the price of oil. Bankers couldn’t stop women from entering the workforce. Here’s an article discussing the prevailing wisdom prior to Volcker’s tenure (apologies for the length):

As Arthur Burns, the chairman of the Federal Reserve at the time, explained in 1974, the “manipulation of oil prices and supplies by the oil-exporting countries came at a most inopportune time for the United States. In the middle of 1973, wholesale prices of industrial commodities were already rising at an annual rate of more than 10 per cent; our industrial plant was operating at virtually full capacity; and many major industrial materials were in extremely short supply”.

In addition to these cost pressures, the U.S. oil industry had a lack of excess production capacity, which meant it was difficult for the industry to bring more oil to market if needed. Thus, when OAPEC cut oil production, prices had to rise because the American oil industry could not respond by increasing supply.

Additionally, non-Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil sources were declining as a percentage of the world oil industry, and OPEC was therefore gaining a larger percentage of the world oil market. These market dynamics, matched with the effect of OPEC nations’ greater participation rights in the industry, allowed OPEC to wield a much larger influence over the price setting mechanism in the oil market since their formation in 1960.

The devaluation of the dollar that was experienced in the early 1970s was also a central factor in the price increases instituted by OAPEC. Since the price of oil was quoted in dollar terms, the falling value of the dollar effectively decreased the revenues that OPEC nations were seeing from their oil. OPEC nations resorted to pricing their oil in terms of gold and not the dollar. Due to the ending of the Bretton Woods agreement, which had pegged gold to a price of $35, the price of gold rose to $455 an ounce by the end of the 1970s. This drastic change in the value of the dollar is an undeniably important factor in the oil price increases of the 1970s.

Oil Shock of 1973-74 (Federal Reserve History)

I’ve told this story many times before, especially about the role of oil, but this book added some additional details I didn’t know. While I thought this explanation was universally rejected by all mainstream economists, it turns out that Princeton professor and economic big-shot Alan Blinder has long argued for this story, and has even published several papers on the topic which Blyth and Fraccaroli draw on for their analysis. This paper by Blinder, for example, is available on the internet:

The Anatomy of Double-Digit Inflation in the 1970s (National Bureau of Economic Research, PDF)

According to Blinder, all of the excessive inflation above baseline during the 1970s can be attributed to these “special factors.” If Blinder is correct—and I believe he is—then inflation didn’t have anything to do with “expectations” becoming “de-anchored” as the mainstream explanation has it. Nor did have anything to do with the money supply.

According to this alternative story, rather than a “hero,” Paul Volcker was the villain who destroyed the American economy so completely and so thoroughly—including the destruction of American manufacturing—that it never truly recovered. And it was all for nought. Much of the pain felt in the Rust Belt after the 1980s and the destruction of the American middle class can be laid at his feet. This has led us to where we are today.

BIG by Matt Stoller

On the Tragedy of Paul Volcker

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7 years ago · 41 likes · Matt Stoller

According to this narrative, the Great Inflation of the 1970s wasn’t caused by people’s inflation expectations becoming de-anchored. Rather, it was caused by a series of shocks—military spending in Vietnam, extreme weather, a series of failed harvests, oil supply shocks, fundamental social changes, the easing of price controls, and the end of Bretton Woods. It had nothing whatsoever to do with “too much money,” or deficits as Milton Friedman and his acolytes argued, and as libertarians still argue today. In fact, an expanding money supply was necessary to pay the increased prices—an effect, not a cause. Nor was it the result of a “wage-price spiral.” Workers did bargain with their employers for higher wages, but this did not cause inflation in and of itself.

Recall…that many analysts of the 1970s inflation writing in the 1980s saw the causes of inflation as due to “special factors”as Alan Blinder put it, that had more or less run their course by the time Volcker jacked up rates. Specifically, running the United States economy super-hot to finance the Vietnam war without raising taxes was inherently inflationary. Having a weak Federal reserve chair in the form of Arthur Burns, who was basically “in the bag” for Nixon’s reelection, was inflationary. Incorporating women and minorities into the US labor market at scale for the first time without enough capital deepening to increase productivity was inflationary. Coping with two failed major harvests in the USA and the USSR, plus two oil shocks in a single decade, plus the decision to put mortgage costs into the US CPI after rates started going up, all pushed inflation higher and higher. (pp. 78-79)

So important were these transitory factors that Blinder concludes that by the time they reversed. “the deceleration of mortgage costs and energy prices was so extreme that they alone were to bring the inflation rate down about 8 percentage points from the first half of 1980 to the second half.” Indeed, Blinder goes so far as to argue that “many people continue to this day to give credit to the recession for breaking the back of the double-digit, whereas, in fact, it was the waning of special factors that did the trick.”

Blinder reexamined this thesis in 2013 with updated data and alternative methods and found that his “‘old fashioned’ supply shock explanation holds up quite well.” In this new analysis he found that the “special factors” still explained “more than 100 percent of the rise (and subsequent fall) of headline inflation—that is, the supply-shock explanation…actually overexplains the Great Inflation.” Blinder further emphasizes once again that “anyone who tries to explain the rise and fall of core inflation over the 1972 to 1975 period without paying careful attention to price controls is missing something very important.” (pp. 144-145, emphasis in original)

The reason we didn’t have inflation before the 1970s was because these “special factors” did not occur. Nor did they occur again after the 1970s, at least until 2020.

Rethinking the Great Moderation

So why, then, did inflation come down in the early 1980s if not for Paul Volcker and his punishing interest rate hikes? Wasn’t this the ultimate vindication of Volcker and Friedman’s monetarist ideas? Certainly everyone seems to think so, as we saw last time. But, again, there are reasons to question this narrative.

In reality, the factors that caused inflation subsided, and therefore inflation subsided as well.

By the early 1980s, women had mostly been integrated into the workforce. The Vietnam War ended in 1973, and along with it, the draft. Another factor was deregulation. The Motor Carrier Act of 1980, passed by the Carter Administration, deregulated the trucking industry. Truckload shipment rates fell by 25%, adjusted for inflation, from 1977 to 1982. Logistics costs also fell over the next several decades, enabling the birth of big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Costco (and, after the internet, Amazon). See this article for details:

How a little-known 1980 law slashed pay for millions of truck drivers and created big-box retail as we know it (Business Insider)

An even more obscure regulation that was repealed was Regulation Q, which imposed maximum rates of interest on demand deposits such as savings accounts. This meant that, due to Regulation Q, no matter how much the Fed raised interest rates, it effectively made no difference to most people. The repeal of Regulation Q has also been cited as the reason inflation receded, although this view also based on the monetarist idea that raising interest rates is the most effective weapon against inflation.

But by far the biggest factor was the falling price of oil. The high oil prices and tight markets of the 1970s prompted a wave of investment in exploration to find new sources of petroleum outside the control of OPEC. This led to a boom in offshore drilling. In the United States, notable discoveries that came online during this time included Alaska’s North Slope and the Gulf of Mexico. The Trans-Alaska pipeline began pumping oil in 19772. In Europe, discoveries included the North Sea oil fields and the Caucasus. Price controls on petroleum products were removed. This dramatic decline in the price of oil can be seen, for example, in charts of oil prices. It even has its own name: The 1980s Oil Glut. Oil prices went down and remained low for decades thereafter, spiking only briefly in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. According to Wikipedia:

Oil prices after 1980 began a steady decline over the next 20 years, except for a brief uptick during the Gulf War, which then reached a 60% fall-off in the 1990s. Mexico, Nigeria, and Venezuela’s major oil exporters expanded their production during this time. The Soviet Union became the largest oil producer in the world, and oil from the North Sea and Alaska flooded the market.

But if all you look at is the money supply, you will not notice any of this. You will see the money supply and inflation declining in tandem and conclude they must be related. Economics is the only “science” where correlation equals causation.

So what really caused the Great Moderation? And why didn’t inflation come back? As we saw last time, this is almost universally attributed to independent central banks, monetary policy and inflation targeting. Volcker’s successor, Alan Greenspan, was hailed as a “maestro” for supposedly managing the American economy to allow for both expansion and low inflation.

But Blyth and Fraccaroli point to a different explanation—globalization.

They argue that the massive globalization the world underwent from 1981 to 2008 was inherently deflationary. Nineteen eighty-one is generally seen as the kickoff for China’s opening up to the world, becoming the world’s factory floor. Over this time period, literally billions of low-wage workers were added to the global labor pool.

Many other formerly third world countries liberalized their markets as well, often pursuing a similar export strategy. In addition, the fall of the Iron Curtain caused new markets to be added to the global economy (rendering the term “third world country” obsolete). The acronym BRICS referred to four of the largest of these economies: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Russia, especially, needed money, as its economy was fairly backward and poorly managed due to years of communism and corruption, so it flooded the world’s oil markets driving down energy prices to historic lows.

In fact, these factors were also indirectly responsible for the fall of Communism. Collectivization meant that Soviet agriculture was backward and inefficient. Falling oil prices and a strong dollar in the 1980s meant that the Soviet Union was unable to secure enough dollars to buy food on international markets by selling oil as they had done previously. The resulting discontent fueled a wave of rebellion against communist governments, eventually bringing the whole project down by the 1990s.

The transportation revolution and the globalization of supply chains caused the cost of shipping to fall drastically, particularly the development of the shipping container and the increasingly mammoth size of pelagic cargo ships. This revolution is chronicled, for example, in the book, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson. As mentioned earlier, the deregulation of trucking caused domestic transport costs to fall (as well as driving down wages and creating miserable working conditions for truckers). The computer/telecommunications revolution played a role as well, making logistics more efficient and creating new billion-dollar companies virtually overnight. All of these factors would require their own book (or post) to fully document, but they all played a role.

Economic historian Robert Skidelsky argues that central banks wrongly attributed the source of the Great Moderation to their own policies given the statistical link between interest rates and prices observed in that period. By contrast, he argues that “a better explanation of the correlation is the massive entry of cheap Chinese goods into the world market, which subdued inflation and enabled central banks to keep the cost of credit very low.” Banker Stephen D. King shares a similar view, as he explains that the incorporation of low-cost producers, such as China and India, into the global trading system resulted in manufactured goods prices falling relative to Western incomes during the Great Moderation. (p. 152)

In fact, as Blyth and Faccroli document, the natural tendency of modern industrial economies is toward low interest rates and deflation, not inflation. This is due to technological development, increased competition, and rising productivity. They argue that the the 1970s was an aberration that we mistakenly took to be the normal state of affairs.

Somewhat inconveniently for the “too much money” hypothesis of Milton Friedman and his acolytes, during this long period of sustained low inflation the amount of money in the economy grew significantly, yet inflation was nowhere to be seen. In fact, there were even worries inflation might get too low during this time, falling below the Fed’s two percent target. Not only that, while libertarians insist that high inflation is caused by government spending and deficits, during the 1970s public debt was low and falling as a share of GDP. However, public debt and deficits rose consistently throughout the Great Moderation, driven mostly by large tax cuts for the rich. You might think this would cause libertarians to rethink Milton Friedman and his ideas, but you would be wrong.

All of this indicates that the inflation of the 1970s was ultimately transitory. People don’t understand that “transitory” does not mean “short lived.” The dinosaurs were transitory, even though they lived for hundreds of millions of years. Ancient Egypt was transitory, even though its culture survived for millennia. Many of the above factors took years to work through, but they did subside, and when they did, so did inflation, regardless of the Fed’s actions or lack thereof. As this comment notes:

This goes to a basic framing issue that crops up all the time in economics. [Situation] → [Authorities Do Something] → [New Situation] then everyone assumes that the authorities were primarily responsible for the change.

It seems like pretty intuitive logic but it doesn’t make any sense on inspection; people adjust to changing economic circumstances much faster than the authorities can change things. The situation will change quickly even if the authorities do nothing. Lessons that get ‘learned’ about crises and responding to them are probably a build-up of rain dances rather than actual knowledge.

It is a situation primed to promote economic witchcraft. Nobody agrees with which parts of [it] are the most cargo-culty because political groups generally support the stupid ideas which happen to favour them.

The decades of sustained low inflation after 1980, then, were not due to inflation targeting or the genius of central bankers like Alan Greenspan. It was due to the fact that we did not have any further black swan shocks after 1980, low energy prices, relatively placid geopolitics, the fall of communism, deregulation, the information revolution, technological innovation, and the massive wave of globalization that swept the planet during the late twentieth century adding billions of low-wage workers to the global labor pool. In other words, a lot of it was simply down to luck and circumstance.

The narrative of “genius” central bankers was shattered forever in 2007-2008 as the global economy collapsed and bankers totally failed to see it coming, prompting a wave of questions and soul-searching. Alan Greenspan was out; Ben Bernanke was in. Bernanke engaged in “quantitative easing” to prevent the banks from failing and keep the US economy from stalling. There were numerous warnings from the usual suspects that expanding the money supply too quickly would cause inflation, or even hyperinflation, yet it never came.

In economic jargon, increased government spending is called fiscal stimulus, as opposed to the monetary stimulus performed by central banks. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, economists from the Keynesian school called for massive government spending to prevent another Great Depression. However, due to political concerns over inflation and the national debt, these measures were much lower than what they recommended leading to over a decade of substandard growth in the US and Europe. Consumer goods like food, clothing, entertainment, travel, and electronics remained fairly cheap during this time as seen, for example, in the proliferation of Dollar Stores. Meanwhile, asset prices continued to rise due to the permanently low interest rates put in place to stimulate lending.

Then came the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. In the pandemic’s aftermath, inflation spiked to double digits in the world’s largest industrial economies for the first time since the 1970s, barring a few marginal outliers like Argentina, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. What was to be done? Well, that depended on what you thought the cause of inflation was. Conventional wisdom was that only a recession and mass unemployment would cause inflation to fall. This was supposedly the “lesson” of the 1970s.

But was this inflation really similar to what happened in the 1970s? Didn’t the closing down of global supply chains and forcing millions of workers to stay home in the world’s major industrial economies have something to do with it? And what about climate change, failed harvests and the war in Ukraine? What about the power of labor versus capital compared to then? According to monetarists, at least, the answer was “no.” Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon…

What really caused the post-pandemic inflation? And why did we do what we did when it happened? Blyth and Fraccaroli call this the “politics of blame” and discuss it in chapter three, which is what we’ll be talking about next time.

I don’t like to retread old ground, but I think this topic is extremely important.

A while back, I wrote a series of posts about inflation. I was upset by the reasons people were giving for why inflation was happening and what we were being told to do about it. To me, neither of these things made any sense.

In the last post of that series, I wrote an outline of a talk given by political economist Mark Blyth about a new book he was writing about inflation. Well, now that book is out. It’s called Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers by Mark Blyth and Niccoló Fraccaroli.

I found a lot of my opinions and concerns echoed in this book, this time backed by solid academic studies, research, data, and statistics compiled by two leading academics.

At the heart of the book is a question posed by the authors: Why do we do what we do when we have inflation? This inevitably leads to another, closely related question: What are the causes of inflation? because what we do about inflation is directly related to what we think the causes are.

They then pose the question, Why did we fail to see this one coming? referring the most recent bout of inflation which roiled the world in the aftermath of global pandemic. They ask whether the actions taken by government officials to prevent and mitigate inflation are chosen for their effectiveness, or rather to further the interests of the rich and powerful—in other words, class war. Finally, they ponder if we’re likely to see more of it the future. These questions are answered over the course of the book.

I know of lot of readers probably think economics is boring—and they’re right, it is boring! But the reason I personally find it so fascinating is because it explains how the world we live in works. You simply can’t understand why the world is the way it is, or what’s going on around us, without an understanding of economics. And, too often, the academic discipline we call “economics” obscures more than it reveals, with its depiction of economies as value-free exchange systems taking place somewhere outside of society governed by timeless universal laws. In conventional economics, there are no winners and no losers—everyone is better off. But the real world doesn’t work that way.

In truth, economic relations are social relations, and economics is really a sub-branch of sociology. I think the way the subject is treated—especially the extreme mathematization—is the reason why people find it so boring, rather than the subject itself. It wasn’t always that way—political economy (Blyth’s own discipline) combined mathematics with telling compelling and descriptive stories about how the economy actually operated. That approach is much more apt, I think, and much more interesting.

So let’s dive in.

A. The mainstream story

So why do we do what we do when we have inflation?

The short answer is because of what happened in the 1970s, around which the economic history of the post-war world pivots.

This story has been told a million times by now, but we have to tell it again to set the background.

After the global conflagration of Second World War, the industrial nations of the world needed to rebuild. The only major power whose territory and industrial base remained intact and unscathed during the war was the United States which suddenly found itself thrust into the global leadership role. A series of international agreements were hashed out and new institutions established among the world’s leading industrial powers. The United States funded the reconstruction of Europe including former foes Japan and Germany.

This led to what has been called “The Golden Age of Capitalism,” combining high rates of growth, new and transformational technologies, and increasing living standards for almost everyone in First World countries after 1945, including the average worker. Watch any media from this time and life just looks, well, easier.

Growth during this time benefited everyone, not just the rich. Inequality actually fell during this period, as gains from growth were broadly shared with workers. The portion of the economy controlled by the richest one percent actually declined, as did corporate profits, even though there were still plenty of rich people around. This has been called “The Great Compression” due to the compression of incomes and the establishment of a broad middle class.

The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid- Century (NBER)

This economic regime has often been referred to as Keynesian, after the influential British economist whose theories provided the basis for it, John Maynard Keynes (pronounced ‘canes’). Keynesianism was based on the idea that governments had a role to play in managing the economy. Under this regime, officials were charged with the so-called dual mandate: full employment and price stability.

The reason why these policies were so important is because it was widely understood at the time that economic hardship and mass unemployment were the root causes for the rise of fascism in Europe. The people who had lived through the war years were determined to make sure it never happened again, and they also wanted to make sure that capitalism delivered a higher standard of living than its rival, communism. Keynesianism and the dual mandate were key parts of those goals.

You probably already know that it all fell apart in the 1970s.

In the late 1960s prices started to slowly rise. This eroded workers’ purchasing power. Banks were hit because loans were paid back in ever-less-valuable dollars. Businesses had a hard time budgeting for the future, as did state and local governments.

Inflation continued to rise precipitously throughout the decade of the 1970s and, according the mainstream story, politicians seemed powerless to stop it. Everything they tried—like price and wage controls (and buttons)—failed. Previously, inflation was seen as the result of a strong and robust economy “overheating,” yet now it was happening even as growth sputtered and faltered. Economic growth stagnated even while inflation continued to rise—something known as stagflation (inflation + stagnation). Economists refer to this as “The Great Inflation” of the 1970s.

Then, according to the legend, Democratic President Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker to be the head of the US Federal Reserve—essentially the government’s bank and the central node of the global banking system. Volcker made it clear that he would do whatever it took to rein inflation in, even if it meant raising interest rates to punishing levels never seen before. No matter the effects on the United States’—or the world’s—economy, he would keep raising interest rates forever until inflation came down.

This was based on the idea promoted by economist Milton Friedman that inflation could only be caused by one thing, and one thing only: too much money. He phrased this in a saying that has become, in essence, the Nicene Creed for economists, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” I’ll bet you’ve heard that one before. This concept is known as monetarism, and the manipulation of interest rates in order to influence the amount of money in the banking system is known as monetary policy.

Here are the authors explaining the theory behind monetary policy:

Central banks can buy and sell assets to push cash into the economy, known as quantitative easing, which you do when you have a deflation. And they can (crudely) raise the price of borrowing money—interest rates—via so-called market operations, or paying interest on reserves to commercial banks, which you do when you have an inflation…

Higher interest rates increase the cost of borrowing in the banking sector, making banks, in turn, more reluctant to lend money to everyone else. In theory, as banks make lending scarce, firms will cut back on investment and expansion, which in turn leads firms to reduce production, their number of employees, or both. As borrowing becomes more costly for individuals, consumption falls.

So no matter whether you think inflation comes from higher price margins, or overstimulation of spending, or wage pressures…higher interest rates are the tool most often used to cool down an overheated economy. (pp. 37-39)

Predictably, what became known as “Volcker’s hammer” tanked the American economy. Unemployment rose to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Many small businesses went under and many workers lost their jobs. American manufacturing was devastated and never recovered. The Savings and Loan crisis unfolded in the banking sector. But the effects weren’t limited to the United States. Emerging economies in Latin America had taken out loans in dollars during the previous decades when interest rates were low. These countries now had to exchange more of their own local currencies in order to secure the dollars to pay back their loans, leading to debt crises, higher inflation, and low growth in the countries which had taken out the loans1. Blyth and Fraccaroli describe the results of Volcker’s hammer:

Taken on its own terms raising interest rates may have been beneficial if the only policy goal was to tame inflation. But in reality, there is never only one goal, and the interest rate hammer affects different constituencies and even different countries, in a variety of ways. Volcker’s hammer proved especially, deadly for low-income individuals, as not only were their job prospects destroyed, they now faced higher rates of interest on their mortgages and loans…the Fed’s monetary tightening brought about an important distributional shift. It rewarded lenders and punished borrowers, especially poor borrowers who already pay more for their credit and who are more likely to be made unemployed in a downturn.

Moreover, by deliberately creating unemployment, the Fed lowered the bargaining power of workers and trade unions, which as we show later, harmed long-term wage growth. It also made public debt more costly, pushing governments to moderate their social spending on such things as welfare expenditures and unemployment benefits…Central banks thus became “the extension of conservative politics by technocratic and nondemocratic means.”

Internationally, given the global role of the dollar, Volcker’s hammer also had massive repercussions abroad. Emerging markets such as Mexico, Brazil and Argentina had huge loans denominated in dollars. They had been encouraged to borrow in dollars by US banks keen to recycle so-called petrodollars that they earned as a windfall when OPEC raised oil prices in 1973…And then Volcker’s hammer descended.

Raising rates in the United States made the dollar more attractive, because lending in dollars would yield higher returns, which meant the value of the dollar increased against other currencies. Mexicans, Brazilians and Argentines now needed to exchange much more of their local currency to repay the same amount of dollars. In August 1982, Mexico threatened to default, which would likely have blown up the US banks that lent them money in the first place…But Mexico was not alone in their predicament, and soon the problem spread to Argentina and Brazil. The result was a debt crisis, a lost decade of growth for all of Latin America, and a pile of debt so large that Latin America can never conceivably pay it back. Yes, US domestic inflation was tamed, possibly by raising rates, but at what price? (pp. 41-43)

Jimmy Carter—the president who had appointed Volcker—lost the 1980 election in a landslide to Republican Ronald Reagan, who was able to blame Carter for the economic “malaise” under his leadership. During Reagan’s first term, inflation finally subsided. By 1982 inflation, although still high by today’s standards, was much lower than it had been since the early 1970s. The Reagan campaign released a famous campaign commercial touting this as “morning in America.” This led to the idea that Republicans are better for the economy—a misconception that persists to this day2.

The raising of interest rates to punishing levels in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the resulting breaking of inflation, were seen as a vindication of monetarism. Paul Volcker was widely hailed in the press as a hero for “rescuing” the American economy from inflation by doing the things that others weren’t willing to do, when, in reality, he had done so only by effectively destroying the American economy in the process. Volcker’s actions echoed the same logic as seen in the Vietnam War years earlier: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Reagan was credited with standing firmly behind Volcker’s brutal policies, and even with appointing Volcker to lead the Federal Reserve despite the fact that it was Carter—not Reagan—who initially appointed him.

[Paul] Volcker became chairman of the Fed in August 1979 and after a short delay began to rapidly raise [interest] rates from 10 percent in January 1979 to 19 percent in June 1981. Here’s the key bit, Under his chairmanship inflation dropped from 13 percent in 1979 to around 4 percent in 1982. This is almost universally attributed to Volcker’s insistence on driving rates up in order to drop employment down. That is the key lesson we take away from the 1970s.

And driving up rates certainly seemed to drive down employment. Unemployment grew from 5.6 percent in 1979 to 10.8 percent at the end of 1982. Concomitantly, firms went bust in large numbers and the economy slowed down considerably. The obvious question remains: Was the pain worth the cost? (p. 41)

The election of Ronald Reagan ushered in a new set of economic policies which collectively became known as neoliberalism. Unlike Keynesianism, neoliberalism argued that the government’s role in the economy should be minimized as much as possible and that “free markets” were self-regulating and self-correcting based on the economic theories of people like Milton Friedman who tirelessly pushed these ideas in the media.

Neoliberalism brought a return to economic growth, but this growth was tepid and anemic compared to the rapid and broadly-distributed growth seen during the Golden Age of Capitalism. But it also brought a spectacular explosion of wealth and income inequality. Inequality rose to levels not seen since the Gilded Age. By the second decade of the Twenty-first century, workers had lost all of the economic gains they had made during the Great Compression. Union membership declined. There were more and more billionaires. Competition for available jobs became fierce. Things like housing, education and health care exploded in price. The middle class began to erode. The rich got richer, and life got harder for everyone else.

Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998 (Quarterly Journal of Economic Research, PDF)

Inflation continued to fall throughout the decade of the 1980s. By 1990, it was quite low, and it remained low for an extraordinary several decades thereafter. This period became known as “The Great Moderation” (economists love their “Great” terms). As a result of the Great Moderation, inflation was seen by economists as once and for all a solved problem—something that would never again be inflicted upon us because central bankers knew how to control it by manipulating interest rates and increasing unemployment.

During the 2007-2008 housing crisis, trillions of dollars evaporated when the housing bubble burst, prompting the US government to issue trillions of dollars in “quantitative easing” (see above) to keep the banks afloat and rescue the American (and the global) economy.

When asset prices crash, the effect is actually deflationary. Due to deleveraging, trillions of dollars in paper wealth suddenly disappear when people can no longer pay back their loans, shrinking the money supply. Much of the money the government subsequently pumped into the American economy was expressly designed to reignite inflation and to prevent deflation from happening. Inflation was not seen as a major concern. For example, Japan, which had pumped billions of Yen into its economy after its own real estate bubble burst in the late 1990s, had experienced a decade of deflation rather than inflation. And, even if inflation came back, it was thought that officials knew how to handle it—just raise interest rates.

What made this tricky was that, during this time, in order to stimulate an economy devastated by the housing crash, the Fed pushed interest rates to near zero in order to encourage people to take out loans and buy houses. The problem is that, once interest rates are effectively zero, it is impossible to lower them any further in the event of another downturn. This is known as the zero lower bound problem. Yet, despite all this quantitative easing and lowering of interest rates, inflation did not return. However, asset prices, encouraged by the availability of cheap credit, rose dramatically3.

Then came the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. As economies slowly opened back up, inflation came back with a vengeance. Inflation hit economies around the world unequally at levels not seen since the 1970s. Central banks raised interest rates as expected, but the world economy was still recovering from the economic shocks caused by the global pandemic. Political regimes all over the world suffered populist backlash from rising prices which seemed stubbornly persistent, even in the face of interest rate hikes.

So that’s a potted economic history of the late twentieth century. Why do we do what we do when we have inflation? Simple. We raise interest rates because that’s what Paul Volcker did in the 1970s.

B. Why did it happen?

But why did the inflation of the 1970s happen in the first place? And why was raising interest rates supposedly the thing that cured it?

According the Blyth and Fraccaroli, the conventional economic explanation centers around “expectations.”

That is, inflation happens because people expect it to happen.

That may seem a little flip and sarcastic, but it really is the conventional explanation in a nutshell. This is what is known as the inflation expectations hypothesis. This site explains it pretty well:

What are inflation expectations? Why do they matter? (Brookings)

According to this explanation, when people expect inflation to be high, they behave in ways that make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because they expect to pay higher prices in the future, prices go up in line with expectations. Consumers react by bargaining with their employers for higher wages to pay those higher prices. This, in turn, forces businesses to raise their prices to compensate. In economic jargon, people’s inflation expectations become “de-anchored.”

In the aftermath of the war, over a third of the American workforce was unionized. Although it may seem unimaginable to workers today, union contracts often had something built in called a cost of living adjustment, or COLA. This was an automatic raise given to workers to cope with higher prices so they wouldn’t lose purchasing power.

According to the theory, people suddenly began expecting prices to go up and, due to things like COLA contracts, they were able to negotiate regular pay raises. This caused everyone else in the economy to demand higher pay, too. Because businesses had to pay their workers more, they raised prices in order to defend their profits. People saw these rising prices, in turn, and demanded more money from their employers. This went around and around again in a feedback loop known as a wage-price spiral.

But the thing that ultimately enabled all of this were the full employment policies pursued by governments around the world under Keynesianism. People could demand more money from their employers because everybody knew that governments wouldn’t let unemployment get too far out of hand.

In theory, at least, inflation gets ugly when, to use the language of economics, inflation “expectations” get “de-anchored.” … people keep expecting prices to go up because they have already gone up, and given this expectation, businesses raise prices in an anticipatory manner, generating inflation in the process. Prices have, as economists say, “lost their anchor.”

If this happens, economic theory predicts that people will buy items now rather than tomorrow, because they expect prices for such items to cost more tomorrow. They’ll also ask for higher wages to cope with those higher expected future prices. In doing so, however, both demand and wages rise, pushing firms to charge higher prices for their limited supply of goods, which is also more costly to them because they have to pay higher wages. And so prices and wages push each other upward in a cycle. (pp. 17-18)

The solution, then, was to “re-anchor” people’s inflation expectations in such a way that they no longer expected prices to rise. They would then stop demanding raises and the wage-price spiral would be broken. This is what Volcker’s interest rate hikes were designed to do. By suppressing economic activity—even engineering a full-on recession—people would no longer expect prices to rise. They would no longer demand regular pay increases from their employers anymore, especially if they felt lucky to have a job at all.

This was related to the idea that there was a tradeoff between employment and inflation, something described by the Phillips curve. The idea behind the Phillips curve was that there a certain level of employment beyond which prices would start to rise4. If unemployment ever got below this number, the thinking went (that is, if too many people had jobs), it could potentially reignite inflation, possibly leading to another wage-price spiral.

What was this magic level of unemployment? No one seemed to really know.

Rather than pursue full employment, then, the idea was to maintain the maximum level of employment consistent with stable prices, and no more. This meant that governments around the world abandoned their commitment to full employment and started to deliberately pursue a policy of higher unemployment if prices started to rise. They still do.

Two other concepts were central to the Great Moderation—independent central banks and inflation targeting.

The idea behind independent central banks was to insulate bankers from the political winds allowing them to make the hard choices to keep inflation under control. Interest rate hikes would put a brake on the economy which would always be politically unpopular. Politicians would always want to “goose” the economy to gain popularity and win reelection, regardless of what the economy actually needed. To prevent this, then, bankers had to be completely insulated from popular pressure5.

Inflation targeting was the idea that interest rates could be manipulated in such a way to hit a specific inflation target. The idea was that by carefully adjusting various policy dials, central bankers could maintain a “Goldilocks” level of inflation—not too high and not too low. This level was determined to be around two percent. This was first implemented in New Zealand, and its success there caused it to be emulated by other central banks around the world. The resulting decades of low inflation appeared to be a vindication of these ideas.

Previously, it was normal practice for the finance minister to instruct the central bank around its policy priorities, including inflation. Such considerations were both highly political and inherently distributional. For example, reducing inflation meant, at least in theory and in much experience, higher unemployment (yes, the usual Philips curve). As such, how much prices should come down was then a political decision that should be made by the elected government and not the central bank.

Under the Reserve Bank Act, and with its greater independence, the only role for the government was to agree, together with the central bank, on the specific inflation target in what was called the “policy target agreement.” It was up to the bank how to make that happen. The channel to make that happen was our old friend “inflationary expectations.” (p. 148)

It was heady time between the fall of Communism and the global financial crisis of 2007-08. Francis Fukiyama had proclaimed “the End of History,” and economists agreed, believing that inflation was once and for all a solved problem. It could only be caused by too much money and too low unemployment. If inflation started to rise, raise interest rates and increase unemployment. If the economy slowed down too much, lower interest rates (unless you were at the zero lower bound, that is). Growth gradually resumed, prices remained stable, global poverty declined, and the rich continued to get richer. And we all lived happily ever after—until 2020, that is.

This story is almost universally accepted by mainstream economics, the media, and the general public. See, this comment, for example, which reflects the standard received economic “wisdom.” As Ben Bernanke remarked, “[I am] optimistic for the future because I am confident that monetary policymakers will not forget the lessons of the 1970s.” (p. 155, emphasis in original).

With Bernanke’s optimism we come full circle. The ideas of the 1970s that inflation may be “always and everywhere monetary” was really a claim about people’s price and wage expectations becoming unanchored. Once that becomes the main lesson of the 1970s, it’s a short step to viewing institutions that manage such expectations—central banks and their all-important “credibility” to raise rates—as the most important tool of economic management.

But…these institutions have a very narrow set of operational tools—raise and lower rates, buy and sell assets. When things are going well we attribute the good outcomes to the institutions we have built to assure those outcomes. The fact that these things were going well (low inflation) proved that inflation expectations must be anchored by those institutions. And what does the main lesson of the 1970s teach us? That such anchoring cannot happen without those institutions, which is rather circular, to say the least. (p. 156)

But there’s an alternative story about what happened in the 1970s, and this story leads to very different conclusions. In this story, Volcker isn’t a “hero” and inflation is hardly a solved problem. This story also explains why inflation came back with a vengeance, why we failed to see it coming, and why the usual measures were ineffective. And it implies we’re in for a very scary future. It’s a story I’ve told myself numerous times right here on this blog. Blyth and Fraccaroli tell this story as well in their book, adding some important additional details I never knew before.

That’s the story we’ll be looking at next time.

Uncharted Territories

What Are My Politics?

I don’t like writing about politics because it’s depressing, and exhaustively covered elsewhere. Let’s make this article an exception: I feel like it’s time for me to address my own political beliefs…

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2 years ago · 202 likes · 214 comments · Tomas Pueyo

Mr. Pueyo is the author of the Substack newsletter Uncharted Territories, which has a number of great posts about how geography and history interact. That’s one of my own interests, so I can highly recommend Mr. Pueyo’ posts about geography which are fascinating, concise, well-written and well-researched.

Reflecting on why this post affected me so much, I think it’s partly because Mr. Pueyo represents a common type on the internet, and particularly among Substack writers:

1. He portrays himself as an “enlightened centrist, “despite the fact that he rejects the “centrist” label, as we’ll see.

2. Despite claiming to be a centrist, he’s very clearly an economic libertarian, which he does not seem to recognize as any sort of bias.

3. He is very sympathetic to billionaires and the billionaire class in general.

4. He believes that “technology will save us” and that “more technology is better.”

5. He is apparently very much invested in the culture war and culture war topics.

6. His beliefs appear to be based more on “vibes” and online algorithms than facts, which is all too common nowadays.

Let’s start with his preamble about how he arrives at his political beliefs. The first point is a good one. Why should you “bundle” your beliefs? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s just a sign of political tribalism as opposed to independent thinking:

First, I find bundling policies to be an absurd inheritance of 18th century technology: If I want to fight climate change, why then must I also support more public education, uncontrolled immigration, trans women in women’s sports, or taking billionaires’ assets? If I think the deficit should be low and the state should be small, why must I also believe that the climate is not changing, or that everyone should be free to carry a weapon?

Of course, he’s giving away a lot of his biases right at the outset. “Taking billionaires’’ assets?” Is he talking about, um, taxes? Is he implying that taxing billionaires is some sort of illegal theft? And “uncontrolled” immigration? We’ve never had such a thing, as we’ll see later. Trans women in sports? Really, that’s important to you? Why? There are perhaps a dozen of those in the third largest country in the world. Don’t we have bigger things to worry about, like sleepwalking into a fascist dictatorship? At least I think so.

And the belief that the budget deficit should be low and the state should be as small as possible—why are either of these desirable? He doesn’t say. We’ll talk about the problems with those beliefs later. And it’s interesting that he asks, “Why should I support more public education?” Really, you think public education is a bad thing? You don’t support public education??? That seems telling. But, anyway, let’s plow on:

Second, people tend to be credulous of what leaders say, simply because they are in leadership. I think we should be the opposite. I have a systematic skepticism, both of what people say and of people in power, so I have twice the skepticism of what people in power say…The consequence is that when I criticize a political leader, you can’t really know whether I favor this leader or not…

All good—we absolutely should be inherently skeptical of any political leader, regardless of which party they happen to belong to. That’s why independent fact-checking is so important. But, as we’ll see, he does not seem to deploy appropriate skepticism in many instances.

Third, and much more importantly, I don’t create an identity around my beliefs. Doing this is dangerous, because it requires that you shift your beliefs to match your identity. That means you will disregard evidence to fit in with a group with shared beliefs.

I am not Centrist either, because that’s just another identity—and many times it’s just a cop-out, to avoid saying that you’re left or right because you don’t fully identify with either. Center is supposed to be in the middle, milquetoast. No: I may support ideas from the left, from the right, from libertarians, from authoritarians, from capitalists, from communists…

So how do I decide my political stance? I look at the topics that matter the most at any given time, reflect on what’s best for society, and pick the position that best achieves that. (emphasis in original)

Again, I agree with all of that (except for listening to authoritarians). You shouldn’t orient your beliefs around a predefined identity—that’s just tribalism. As I’ve always said, partisanship makes you stupid. Like Mr. Pueyo, I give all ideas equal weight, regardless of where they come from, and choose them based on their merits. I don’t affiliate with any party or tribe. And I do think we should do what’s best for society, not just for the wealthy few.

So there’s lots to agree with here, although, in my experience, people who depict themselves as “reasonable centrists” are usually just closet right-wingers who don’t want to be seen as such, at least here in the US. There may indeed be some true “centrists” out there, but they seem to be few and far between.

I’m going to do something I don’t usually do: Share my rough takes on some important, newsworthy topics. Below are my current thoughts on US politics…without having reviewed the issues in depth. I welcome feedback and debate on them! I will review first Republicans (Trump’s administration) and then Democrats…

My goal in this article [is] not to convince you of any policy that US Democrats or Republicans should follow—I haven’t analyzed each one in enough depth to form a definitive opinion. Rather, I have tried to illustrate how I think about politics: Not in terms of one side that should prevail, but rather as independent policies that are better or worse for society, independently from who supports it. (my emphasis)

So he's giving his opinions on topics, despite not having thought about them in depth? That seems odd. In any case, since he welcomes debate and feedback, I’m going to give some here on my own Substack which, unlike his, nobody reads. But it gives me an opportunity to reflect on these topics at length. So let’s take a look.

1. The Republicans:

The concept of DOGE is good…

Yikes! Okay, let’s start there.

So, first off, anyone who thinks an all-out frontal assault on the United States government by an unelected foreign billionaire oligarch is a good thing is obviously someone I’m immediately suspicious of right from the get-go. Why would I support the complete and utter destruction of our nation’s state capacity at the hands of the richest person in the world? Why should I accept the authority of this fake agency made up out of whole cloth—which is probably illegal—to single-handedly override the decisions of our nation’s duly elected representatives? To me, this is basically a coup d’etat organized by the billionaire class.

So, yeah, I disagree with that.

How to Survive the Broligarchy

IT IS A COUP

A short note here on what I’m covering and why. The political changes we’re seeing across the world are underpinned by technological ones that are now accelerating. For more than a decade, I’ve been trying to investigate and expose these forces. Since 2016 that’s included following a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called C…

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2 years ago · 2608 likes · 218 comments · Carole Cadwalladr

So why does Mr. Pueyo think the evisceration of the federal government from within by a foreign billionaire is a good thing?

In companies, you want leaders to act extremely aggressively: Lower costs mean higher margins, more dividends, and higher salaries. Companies have an incentive to save money for this reason. But the state does not: It doesn’t spend its own money, but taxpayers’…

Yeah, okay, here’s the problem: the federal government is not a corporation. The federal government is nothing like at all like a private business. It’s a basic category error. This should be obvious. Why do so many people not understand this?

Now, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I wrote many of my most recent posts after reading this for the first time as an extensive refutation of these ideas. No, the federal government is not like a private business. No, the federal government is not funded by “taxpayer money.” No, there is not a limited pool of money in the world that the government and private sector must fight over in a zero-sum contest for funds. No, shrinking the federal government does not lead to a bigger economy and greater economic prosperity. No, the government’s debt does not have to be paid off—it is an asset of the private sector and is paid off with keystrokes. The deficit is a reflection of macroeconomic conditions, not an end in itself. So, rather than adjudicate all those points at length again here, you can go read my earlier posts if you have not already read them.

So just about everything this guy says so far is dead wrong.

Let’s consider the premise that the federal government is this huge morass of “waste, fraud and abuse” that needs to be reined in to “save taxpayer money.” Mr. Pueyo seems to unquestioningly accept this premise as true.

The perennial claim that the government is too large and bloated after fifty years of privatization and relentless neoliberal assault from both parties is absurd on its face. Governments all over the country have been forced to make bricks without straw for as long as I’ve been alive. At every level, desperate needs go begging while governments paper over deficits with spit and bailing wire, meanwhile the billionaires get ever richer. As I always say, look around you. Does this look like a country that’s been spending too much money?

Trump’s DOGE campaign accelerates 50-year trend of government privatization (The Conversation)

All of the objective evidence indicates that there was not a lot of “fat” to trim from the budget in the first place. The notion that the federal government is a bottomless pit of “waste” is simply a myth propagated by libertarian billionaires and their media outlets. And “fraud” is apparently anything that Elon Musk and his minions find personally distasteful based on their far-right political views, which is not the definition of fraud. If the People’s elected representatives allocate funding for a specific purpose, by definition it is not “fraud,” whether or not you personally agree with it. That is representative democracy. And true fraud—such as deception and misrepresentation—is already policed by the government.

And, as for “abuse,” who they hell knows what that means? Based on their actions, it’s apparently going after tax cheats, regulating crypto, and preventing businesses from ripping people off. Mr. Pueyo seems to accept Elon’s claims at face value, depute previously claiming to be instinctively suspicious of what the people in power say. I guess that does not extend to billionaires.

As many people pointed out at the time, when you look at the growth of federal government employees compared to the private sector, the federal government has grown much more slowly, to the point where even critical services are understaffed and underfunded such as tax collection, infrastructure, and the VA. And the vast majority of government employees are “essential workers” employed at the state and local level doing tasks like teaching, public safety, health care, social services, law enforcement and firefighting—you know, the “heroes.” Why would we want fewer of them?

The Banter

DOGE is Based on a Lie

by Jeremy Novak…

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2 years ago · 53 likes · 2 comments · Thinker at the Gates

As for spending, again, as numerous people pointed out at the time, most of the government’s spending is so-called “non-discretionary” spending that voters have chosen and that people want and need. If you look at government spending as a percentage of GDP, the United States is already much lower than nearly all other peer countries:

List of countries by government spending as percentage of GDP (Wikipedia)

Government Spending Is Out of Control! LOL (The Big Picture)

According to this, by my count, even excluding micronations, countries at war, and other outliers, the US doesn’t even crack the top 40 for spending as a percentage of GDP. So what’s the problem when you’re the world’s second-largest economy and issue the world’s reserve currency (for the time being)? Do we really need a foreign billionaire to single-handedly cut government spending in the name of “efficiency?”

Besides, why the hell do we want an “efficient” government in the first place? The government is not supposed to be efficient—it’s supposed to secure the general welfare for the citizens of the United States according to the Constitution. And I don’t understand why “small government” is inherently beneficial. Counties with smaller governments tend to be poorer, more corrupt, and have lower—not higher—economic growth. The multiplier effect means that every dollar the government spends results in more than a dollar of economic growth. In any case, efficiency should allow you to deliver better services at lower cost, which would theoretically benefit the American people, but doge's idea of “efficiency” seems to be nothing more than indiscriminate mass layoffs.

Trump administration rehires hundreds of federal employees laid off by DOGE (AP)

Besides, many of the problems in American life today come from too little government, not too much. Unlike other countries, the US does very little to guarantee citizens’ access to health care for those under sixty. It sits idly by while the cost of higher education spirals out of control and citizens end up mired in unpayable debt. It does nothing to offset the punitive cost of childcare, putting it all on the backs of parents. It has the weakest labor protections in the entire world, not just the developed world. It has a threadbare social safety net. It spends far more money subsidizing affluence than alleviating poverty, as we saw when we reviewed the work of Matthew Desmond. Contrast this with the blank checks given to the military, guard labor and prisons.

In fact, later on, Mr. Pueyo calls for the government to play a greater role in providing health care:

The US has a massive issue with its healthcare: It’s wasteful and overly expensive, it bankrupts people way too frequently, and it’s not easily accessible to all. So the Democrats should eliminate the stronghold that physicians have on the supply of new physicians, enforce healthcare price transparency, and push for universal healthcare: It works reasonably well in many other countries, and Medicare and Medicaid are not far from that.

Totally agree with all of that. But that seems decidedly at odds with his argument that the government should be run like a private corporation. And while “price transparency” is not a bad thing, it implies that health care is just like any other commodity that we voluntarily shop around for rather than an inelastic good that we have little or no choice but to purchase. And if you want more doctors, look to socialist states like Cuba which have accomplished this far better than capitalist countries. Later in the essay he says:

Today, people with mental illnesses are not properly cared for in the US. They end up in the streets, which lowers the quality of life for them and for the rest of the city. It would be better for everyone if the community paid for their care.

Again, totally agree with that, but how does that comport with his notion that we need doge (I refuse to capitalize it) to slash government spending in the name of “efficiency”? It sounds like he wants the government to do more for its citizens, not less. I mean, Musk even cut essential government agencies like nuclear regulation, food safety, disease response, public libraries and weather forecasting—even meals on wheels and children’s cancer research got the blunt axe. Getting this institutional knowledge back will be very difficult.

But, even if you accept the premise (which is untrue), why would you support an unelected private citizen with clear conflicts of interest to be the person in charge of that effort—much less a billionaire oligarch with documented links to hostile foreign powers like Russia and China according to multiple sources like the Wall Street Journal?

Musk has received over 38 billion dollars in government handouts and subsidies over the years according the Washington Post. His space businesses are entirely sustained by government contracts. This is literally the last person on earth you want in charge of deciding what the government ought to be spending money on and what ought to be eliminated (and that was before the two conspicuous Hitlergrußen at the inauguration).

Notably, the first thing doge did was eliminate all the government agencies that were investigating Musk’s various businesses for breaking the law. He also slashed tax enforcement at the IRS making it harder to collect needed revenue, belying the idea that this effort had anything to do with “saving money.”1 He also eliminated government agencies in charge of protecting consumers from predation by businesses. How is any of this eliminating “fraud and waste?”2 And that’s not even mentioning the unparalleled access he was given to sensitive data outside of the normal protocols and without any oversight which has the potential for serious abuse and is a violation of national security. How is any of this legal?

Even if, despite all this, you thought the government could be run more efficiently, you would appoint people with the appropriate knowledge and expertise to make an assessment—competent people with no conflicts of interest—and act on their recommendations. You wouldn’t want a drug-addled foreign billionaire and bunch of teenage edgelords with questionable backgrounds making these decisions unilaterally.

The problem is, this has already been done before numerous times over the years by various administrations who bought into the false notion that they could save “taxpayer” money by eliminating “waste” only to find out that there was virtually none of it in the first place. We keep running this experiment over and over and finding out the exact same thing: the federal government is actually very efficient at what it does, as even one of Musk’s myrmidons had to admit:

Sahil Lavingia, a tech founder and erstwhile software engineer with Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), revealed in a recent blog post that he had "got[ten] the boot" from the agency after telling Fast Company last month that the federal workforce had turned out to be way more efficient than he anticipated.

In that initial interview, the Gumroad founder said he was impressed to find that his coworkers at the Department of Veterans Affairs "love their jobs" and worked hard at them — an honest admission that seems to have cost him his job.

DOGE Fires Operative After He Admits the Government Was Already Pretty Efficient (Futurism)

President Trump promises to make government efficient − and he’ll run into the same roadblocks as Presidents Taft, Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush, among others (The Conversation)

Paul Krugman

Repost: The Fraudulence of “Waste, Fraud and Abuse”

This was my first Substack post after leaving the New York Times. Reposting now — new post coming in a few hours — because it holds up pretty well, although I underestimated the damage Musk would cause…

Read more

2 years ago · 870 likes · 96 comments · Paul Krugman

Trump Officials Celebrated With Cake After Slashing Aid. Then People Died of Cholera. (ProPublica)

So, no, Mr. Pueyo, I am very much not in favor of the DOGE concept. Not in theory, as sure as hell not in practice. And I think anyone who is seriously misunderstands everything about the role of government in a democracy and is borderline advocating for treason. He goes on:

There are other failures too, like that the US government seems to have several computers outside of the Federal Reserve that can print money—this should be limited to the FED, and should be independent from the government.

Wait, what? The US government should not have the capacity to issue its own currency? How does he think money allocated by Congress is dispersed?

Fortunately, when Musk discovered the shocking “scandal” that the government spends via keystrokes, Stephanie Kelton wrote a post explaining that this is what MMT has said all along, further confirming that the MMT view of government spending is the correct one rather than Musk’s (and, apparently, Mr. Pueyo’s) anti-government, anti-tax libertarianism. She talked about how this works here:

The Lens

Elon Musk Discovers the "Magic" of Modern Money

Yesterday, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) shared a clip from a podcast interview he recorded with Elon Musk. Cruz called it “an absolute bombshell.” The clip went viral because Musk claimed that his band of merry infiltrators (DOGE) had discovered something truly revelatory: the federal government has “magic money computers”. Fourteen of them, to be exact…

Read more

2 years ago · 306 likes · 51 comments · Stephanie Kelton

Note that this directly contradicts Mr. Pueyo’s argument above that the federal government is funded by “taxpayer money” which we need to “save” by making it more “efficient.” The computers issue currency; the Federal Government is not dependent on “taxpayer money” for revenue, nor does it need to stockpile funds or take out loans like private individuals and businesses. They are totally different. And if the government were in permanent surplus, the private sector would have be in deficit by the same amount based on sectoral balances.

When it comes to foreign policy, we’re basically in agreement. He’s against the idea of invading Canada and Greenland, which, um, I guess is good, but he seems awfully sanguine about this rather than pointing out that the idea of invading our NATO allies is absolutely fucking batshit crazy. Even seriously considering this proposal as he does feels like the same sort of “sanewashing” of Trump’s insanity we’re constantly subjected to in the mainstream media.

He also supports our efforts to help the Ukrainians fight off the Russian invasion, which I wholeheartedly agree with. His analogy between Putin’s actions today and Hitler’s actions in the 1930s are completely valid and on point.

Toward the end of this section, Mr. Pueyo wishes for an alliance of Russia and the US against China (which he sees as unrealistic as long as Putin is in charge). But why? I don’t understand this at all. I don’t want to come off as China cheerleader, but I fail to see where the antagonism for the country comes from. One the one hand, they’re constantly touted as the great success story of neoliberalism (the “capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty…” statistic is almost entirely due to their efforts). On the other hand, they are constantly demonized in the capitalist press. Is this just jealously for beating them at their own game? Admittedly, their stance toward Taiwan is concerning, and they are an authoritarian surveillance state. But we seem to be headed that same direction ourselves, and our current leaders don’t seem to be a fraction as competent and are even more ideologically-driven3.

When it comes to tariffs, he’s broadly against them. But even here, the way he approaches the topic is odd, focusing more on Trump’s negotiating tactics rather than why they have been instituted the first place.

The idea that simply making everything imported into the country more expensive for both consumers and producers will magically lead to a revival of domestic industry and increase jobs is without precedent and has no theoretical foundation.

There is some justification for targeted tariffs, but that’s not what’s happening here. We’ve frequently seen arbitrary numbers tossed around (remember the “Liberation Day” formula apparently derived by AI?). And the chaotic and arbitrary nature of these tariffs serves no purpose whatsoever. Clearly they’re not to raise revenue, as the nation’s debt continues to hit all-time highs.

2. The Democrats:

Okay, now let’s talk about his takes on the Democrats. Frankly some of these are baffling. Take this one:

Everyone wants to be safe, but Democratic cities are not. Democrats should stop prioritizing the rights of proven criminals at the cost of the safety of the common people. Democrats should drop their broad opposition to guns (it’s not going to be popular any time soon) and focus on the few positions that are popular (like limiting the sale of automatic weapons or large magazines).

Democrats are prioritizing the rights of criminals at the cost of public safety? That’s a very serious accusation! Where is the evidence? These sound like more like Trump talking points than reasoned opinions. The highest murder rate is actually in Memphis, Tennessee. When you look at the actual data, the cities with high murder rates are about evenly split between “red” and “blue” cities.

https://usafacts.org/articles/which-cities-have-the-highest-murder-rates/

When you zoom out to the state level, the highest homicide rates are overwhelmingly in the solidly Republican states of Dixie. And it’s worth noting that places where the most immigrants actually live are not the ones voting for Trump’s draconian crackdown on immigration—instead it’s racially monolithic white areas. The Democratic candidate for president last time around was a prosecutor, for crying out loud!

And where does he get the idea that there is a broad opposition to gun ownership among Democrats? It’s not part of the Party’s official platform. Instead, Democrats are simply more amenable to sensible gun regulations like the ones he says he supports.

But his real spicy take is that the biggest problem with the Democrats is that they’re too extreme, and they’re just too hard on the poor billionaires!

Culture Wars is not the Democrats’ only shot in the foot. Another has been the unnecessary attack on billionaires like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. I understand being angry about rentiers—people who’ve done nothing in their lives but live off of the rents of their ancestors. But these are not rentiers. They are self-made people, who have built huge and profitable companies that employ hundreds of thousands of people. And they control several media. Why on Earth would you antagonize them?

The US needs strong Democrat leaders to balance out Trump. The only way we’re going to get them is if they are less radical…

That’s right, it’s the Democrats—not the MAGA Republicans, who are too radical and extreme. Good Lord, I think my brain is broken!

What is his evidence that the Democrats are too extreme? Why, it’s the culture war of course!

Now, my take on the culture war is clearly different than his. In my opinion, these are nothing more than weaponized nonsense issues designed to distract us from more pressing concerns. However, browsing his previous posts, he seems to be very invested in these kinds of topics, devoting multiple posts to them. In his preamble, he stated, “I look at the topics that matter the most at any given time…” I guess his definition of what really matters the most right now is quite different than mine, which does not include so-called “wokeness” or transgender athletes. I’m more concerned about creeping authoritarianism, climate change, and medical bankruptcies, among other things. And, once again his portrayal of the Democrats seems to be more based on FOX News and Twitter feeds than on reality4.

As for billionaires, are we so sure Bezos and Musk aren’t rentiers? As I’ve written before, a healthy, functioning market system would not produce billionaires. Every billionaire is a policy failure. There seems to be a clear trend of billionaire boot licking in many of his posts. An example might be this photo of Bezos featured in one of his recent posts, making me wonder if he spends his evenings fantasizing about being Lauren Sanchez. I don’t see what we as a society gain from having single, solitary individuals controlling more money than entire nation-states. As Yanis Varoufakis has written:

Amazon sits at the apex of this new [technofeudal] order because it owns the cloud computing platform – Amazon Web Services (AWS) – upon which other technological firms, such as Uber, rely, but also large parts of banking, healthcare, logistics, public administration, media and education sectors. Once these businesses are embedded in AWS, switching costs become prohibitive. Firms thus become vassals on Amazon’s vast cloud fief and surrender their customers’ data. In 2020, the European commission charged Amazon with using the sales data of other sellers to illegally gain an advantage in the European marketplace…Amazon is a technofeudal rentier owning the digital infrastructure on which privateers, states and societies depend. Thankfully, there are signs of a pushback...

Given that the populists who aggressively take on the plutocracy are the most popular in the Democratic party right now, his admonition to be nicer to the billionaires seems like bad advice. How the billionaires got their money is less important than the power they wield over us. They were front and center at the inauguration, with better seats than even cabinet members. Musk alone spent over a quarter of a billion dollars of his own money to get Trump elected, and directly paid off voters. Is this the kind of government we want? It’s certainly not the government I want. He even acknowledges that billionaires control the media so the Democrats shouldn’t “antagonize” them. Or else what? Isn’t this basically an explicit acknowledgement of the corruption of American democracy? Yet he wants the Democrats to do nothing about it? That’s quite a take!

Culture wars have limited freedom of speech too much, so Democrats should tone it down, which apparently they’re already doing.

Regulations also thwart freedom, so they should be limited whenever possible.

How, exactly, have culture wars limited “freedom of speech?” Remember, freedom of speech refers to government-imposed legal sanctions and penalties for expressing certain opinions, including fines and imprisonment, not getting pushback for your views on Twitter or Facebook, or even dismissal by your employer (which is enabled by weak labor laws). Does he have any examples? Or is it just what he saw on Twitter?

As for regulations, this is trite to the point of meaninglessness. Laws against murder and theft are also “thwarting freedom.” Should we repeal them too? How well did repealing regulations work out for us in 2007-2008 when the global economy melted down necessitating a bailout? (which only the Democrats got blamed for)

When it comes to regulations, I think it’s probably better to apply Chesterton’s Fence here: if you don’t know why a fence is there, it’s better to leave it up than to tear it down and let the chips fall where they may. Mr. Pueyo’s cavalier approach is extremely dangerous when it comes to public policy where lives and livelihoods are at stake. As the saying goes, “regulations are written in blood.” Are there regulations that can go? I’m sure there are. But in general, I think the default attitude should be prudence, unlike Mr. Pueyo. Businesses can fail—in fact, they must fail in order for markets to function properly. But governments cannot afford to fail. That’s a big difference. We saw the results of that attitude back in 2008, and we’re still living with the consequences. FAFO is bad policy when it comes to government.

The cost of Trump’s bank deregulation could be catastrophic (MS Now)

Concerning the Democrats, he writes in a footnote:

They used to be in favor of controlled immigration, which is a reasonable stance, but went for open borders after Trump decided to “build a wall”.

The Democrats “went for open borders”? What the fuck is he taking about?? You can certainly disagree with the Biden administration’s policies towards immigration, but at least say what they actually were, don’t just mindlessly repeat MAGA talking points. I keep posting this over and over again, but I’ll continue to keep posting it until maybe it sinks in:

President Joe Biden has…nearly matched Trump’s deportation figures. According to data from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as of September this year, 1.4 million deportations had been recorded (excluding administrative returns, when individuals voluntarily withdraw their asylum applications). This figure also does not include expulsions under Title 42, which mandated the return of migrants to Mexico while they awaited court dates for asylum requests. Although Title 42 originated under Trump, the majority of the three million resulting expulsions occurred during Biden’s presidency, before the policy was ended in May 2023.

Trump deported fewer people than Obama, Clinton or Bush, but more indiscriminately (El Pais)

How is deporting nearly as many people as Trump’s first administration an “open borders” policy? Please explain this to me, Mr. Pueyo. Or how about this:

On June 4, 2024, Biden passed an executive order to shut down the border if illegal crossings reached an average of 2,500 migrants a day in a given week. Migrant encounters subsequently dropped down to 2020 levels.

And let’s not forget the Republicans’ sabotage of the bipartisan border bill to give Trump something to campaign on:

In February 2024 and again in May 2024, Republicans in the Senate blocked a bipartisan border security bill Biden had pushed for to reduce the number of migrants who can claim asylum at the border and provide more money for Customs and Border Protection officials, asylum officers, immigration judges and scanning technology at the border. It also provided for thousands of work visas for migrant spouses of U.S. citizens awaiting immigrant visas, and 250,000 new visas over five years for people seeking to work in the U.S. or join family members.

It was negotiated in a bipartisan manner and initially looked like it had the votes to pass until Donald Trump opposed it, citing that it would boost Biden's reelection chances.

Immigration policy of the Joe Biden administration (Wikipedia)

How is any of this “free rein” or an “open borders” policy, Mr. Pueyo? Please explain it to me. I’ll wait.

You see the trend here. Why does this “reasonable” open thinker who is supposedly all about “both sides” and opposed to partisanship keep reciting MAGA talking points over and over again as if they were factual, especially with regard to the Democrats? This guy, like a lot writers on Substack, portrays himself as a reasonable centrist with opinions from all over the political spectrum, but the reality tells a different story.

Now, to be fair, I don’t think Mr. Pueyo is merely a MAGA Republican. He doesn’t come off as an ideologue. But I do think it shows just how insidious and effective right-wing talking points are when they simply become the accepted wisdom even when they are total fiction. Add that to the libertarian brain worms and culture war fixation and you get some truly awful takes about a variety of topics, even if some of his opinions don’t fit neatly into the current left/right paradigm.

If you are against regulations, want to shrink the state, want taxes to be minimal, and are against tariffs and public education, well, I have bad news for you, Mr. Pueyo—you’re not as “non-ideological” as you think you are. You are, in fact, a fairly bog standard libertarian. Even his advocacy of a UBI is not incompatible with that—Milton Friedman was for UBI, after all, and even von Hayek was not altogether opposed to things like universal health care, unlike today’s more extreme Republicans.

The problem with Mr. Pueyo’s opinion buffet is that it's hardly non-ideological—it's clearly derived from conventional libertarian beliefs: government bad, taxes bad, billionaires and corporations good, technology good, et cetera, whether he acknowledges it or not. The other problem is that he has a troubling tendency to substitute right-wing talking points for objective facts, as I've tried to point out here. The process by which he and I determine our beliefs are apparently quite similar (assuming he is describing them accurately), however the conclusions we come to are quite different.

While this post focused more on criticisms of these views, what are the things I believe in? I’m out of space, so that will have to wait until next time.

Still working on some stuff, but in the meantime I thought I’d share some of the most interesting Wikipedia articles I’ve collected over the years.

It’s a bit random, but this one tends to focus around archaeology, anthropology, mythology and religion. One theme is the continuity of ancient ideas and traditions into the modern era. Another is the similarities between diverse cultures. There are some other interesting tidbits mixed in as well. Hope you find them interesting!

Glossary of ancient Roman religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_ancient_Roman_religion

Cult is the care (Latin: cultus) owed to deities and temples, shrines, or churches. Cult is embodied in ritual and ceremony. Its presence or former presence is made concrete in temples, shrines and churches, and cult images, including votive offerings at votive sites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_(religious_practice)

In ancient Roman religion, the Di Penates were among the dii familiares, or household deities, invoked most often in domestic rituals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di_Penates

Lares were guardian deities in ancient Roman religion. Their origin is uncertain; they may have been hero-ancestors, guardians of the hearth, fields, boundaries, or fruitfulness, or an amalgam of these.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lares

In the religion of ancient Rome, a haruspex was a person trained to practise a form of divination called haruspicy, the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep and poultry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex

In ancient Roman religion, sacra (Latin, neuter plural, “sacred [matters]”) were transactions relating to the worship of the gods, especially sacrifice and prayer. They are either sacra privata or publica. The former were undertaken on behalf of the individual by himself, on behalf of the family by the pater familias, or on behalf of the gens by the whole body of the people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacra_(ancient_Rome)

A flamen (plural flamines) was a priest of the ancient Roman religion who was assigned to one of fifteen deities with official cults during the Roman Republic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamen

The Sodales or Sacerdotes Augustales (singular Sodalis or Sacerdos Augustalis), or simply Augustales, were an order (sodalitas) of Roman priests originally instituted by Tiberius to attend to the maintenance of the cult of Augustus and the Julii.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodales_Augustales

Manus was an Ancient Roman type of marriage, of which there were two forms: cum manu and sine manu. In a cum manu marriage, the wife was placed under the legal control of the husband. In a sine manu marriage, the wife remained under the legal control of her father.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manus_marriage

Ferragosto is a public holiday celebrated on 15 August in all of Italy. It originates from Feriae Augusti, the festival of Emperor Augustus, who made 1 August a day of rest after weeks of hard work on the agricultural sector. It became a custom for the workers to wish their employers buon Ferragosto and receive a monetary bonus in return.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferragosto

The burakumin (部落民, ‘hamlet/village people’) are the Japanese people commonly believed to be descended from members of the pre-Meiji feudal class who were associated with kegare (穢れ, ‘defilement’), such as executioners, undertakers, slaughterhouse workers, butchers, and tanners.

The term encompasses both the historical eta and hinin outcasts. During Japan's feudal era, these occupations acquired a hereditary status of oppression, and became an unofficial class of the Tokugawa class system during the Edo period. After the feudal system was abolished, the term burakumin came into use to refer to the former caste members and their descendants, who continue to experience stigmatization and discrimination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin Compare to the “untouchables” in India. Here’s a BBC article about this class of people: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34615972

The Mesta was a powerful association protecting livestock owners and their animals in the Crown of Castile that was incorporated in the 13th century and was dissolved in 1836.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesta

Karahan Tepe is an archaeological site in Şanlıurfa Province in Turkey. The site is close to Göbekli Tepe and archaeologists have also uncovered T-shaped stelae there and believe that the sites are related.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe

The Taş Tepeler (Turkish, literally ‘Stone Hills’) is an upland area in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey, near the city of Şanlıurfa. The area has a number of significant prehistoric archaeological sites, including twelve sites with the characteristic T-shaped obelisks well known from Göbekli Tepe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C5%9F_Tepeler

The trifunctional hypothesis of prehistoric Proto-Indo-European society postulates a tripartite ideology reflected in the existence of three classes or castes—priests, warriors, and commoners (farmers or tradesmen)—corresponding to the three functions of the sacral, the martial and the economic, respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifunctional_hypothesis

The Wild Hunt is a folklore motif occurring across various northern, western and eastern European societies, appearing in the religions of the Germans, Celts, and Slavs. Wild Hunts typically involve a chase led by a mythological figure escorted by a ghostly or supernatural group of hunters engaged in pursuit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Hunt

*Trito is a significant figure in Proto-Indo-European mythology, representing the first warrior and acting as a culture hero. He is connected to other prominent characters, such as Manu and Yemo, and is recognized as the protagonist of the myth of the warrior function, establishing the model for all later men of arms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Trito

The *kóryos (Proto-Indo-European for ‘army, war-band, unit of warriors’) refers to the theoretical Proto-Indo-European brotherhood of warriors in which unmarried young males served for several years, as a rite of passage into manhood, before their full integration into society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*K%C3%B3ryos

Assianism is a polytheistic, ethnic and folk religion derived from the traditional narratives of the Ossetians, modern descendants of the Scythians of the Alan tribes, believed to be a continuation of the ancient Scythian religion. It started to be properly reorganized in a conscious way during the 1980s, as an ethnic religion among the Ossetians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assianism

In many historical societies, the position of kingship carried a sacral meaning and was identical with that of a high priest and judge. Divine kingship is related to the concept of theocracy, although a sacred king need not necessarily rule through his religious authority; rather, the temporal position itself has a religious significance behind it. The monarch may be divine, become divine, or represent divinity to a greater or lesser extent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_king

The term Elder, or its equivalent in another language, is used in several countries and organizations to indicate a position of authority. This usage is usually derived from the notion that the oldest members of any given group are the wisest, and are thus the most qualified to rule, provide counsel or serve the said group in some other capacity. They often serve as oral repositories of their culture's traditional knowledge, morals, and values.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_(administrative_title)

The Golasecca culture (9th - 4th century BC) was a Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age culture in northern Italy, whose type-site was excavated at Golasecca in the province of Varese, Lombardy, where, in the area of Monsorino at the beginning of the 19th century, Abbot Giovanni Battista Giani made the first findings of about fifty graves with pottery and metal objects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golasecca_culture

The Este culture or Atestine culture was an archaeological culture existing from the late Italian Bronze Age (10th–9th century BC, proto-venetic phase) to the Iron Age and Roman period (1st century BC). It was located in the modern area of Veneto in Italy and derived from the earlier and more extensive Proto-Villanovan culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Este_culture

Tartessos is, as defined by archaeological discoveries, a historical civilization settled in the southern Iberian Peninsula characterized by its mixture of local Paleohispanic and Phoenician traits. It had a writing system, identified as Tartessian, that includes some 97 inscriptions in a Tartessian language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartessos

El Argar is an Early Bronze Age culture developed in the southeastern end of the Iberian Peninsula. It is believed to have been active from about 2200 BC to 1500 BC. The people developed sophisticated pottery and ceramic techniques that they traded with other Mediterranean tribes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Argar

Cycladic culture (also known as Cycladic civilisation) was a Bronze Age culture (c. 3100–c. 1000 BC) found throughout the islands of the Cyclades in the Aegean Sea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycladic_culture

The house of Murashu were a family of businessmen and moneylenders based at Nippur in Babylonia in the fifth century BCE. They left an archive of hundreds of cuneiform texts which is often used to understand business and society in the Achaemenid empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murashu_family

The House of Egibi was a family from within ancient Babylonia who were, amongst other things, involved in mercantile activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Egibi

Shimao is a Neolithic site in Shenmu County, Shaanxi, China...It is dated to around 2000 BC, near the end of the Longshan period, and is the largest known walled site of that period in China, at 400 ha.

The fortifications of Shimao were originally believed to be a section of the Great Wall of China, but the discovery of jade pieces prompted an archaeological investigation, which revealed that the site was of Neolithic age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimao

Kofun are megalithic tombs or tumuli in Northeast Asia. Kofun were mainly constructed in the Japanese archipelago between the middle of the 3rd century to the early 7th century AD. Many kofun have distinctive keyhole-shaped mounds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kofun Here’s a BBC article about these mysterious tombs: The ancient tombs kept under lock and key

An oppidum (pl.: oppida) is a large fortified Iron Age settlement or town. Oppida are primarily associated with the Celtic late La Tène culture, emerging during the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, spread across Europe, stretching from Britain and Iberia in the west to the edge of the Hungarian Plain in the east. These settlements continued to be used until the Romans conquered Southern and Western Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppidum

The Gallic Empire or the Gallic Roman Empire are names used in modern historiography for a breakaway part of the Roman Empire that functioned de facto as a separate state from 260 to 274.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallic_Empire

Ostrogothic Ravenna refers to the time period in which Ravenna, a city in Northeastern Italy, served as the capital of the Ostrogothic Kingdom, which existed between 493 and 553 CE. During that time, Ravenna saw a great renovation, in particular under Theodoric the Great (454–526).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrogothic_Ravenna

A City God (Chinese: 城隍神; pinyin: Chénghuángshén; lit. ‘god of the boundary’), is a tutelary deity in Chinese folk religion who is believed to protect the people and the affairs of the particular village, town or city of great dimension, and the corresponding location in the afterlife.

City God cults appeared over two millennia ago, and originally involved worship of a protective deity of a town's walls and moats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_God_(China)

The Ancient Greek: δαίμων, spelled daimon or daemon (meaning “god”, “godlike”, “power”, “fate”), originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit, such as the daimons of ancient Greek religion and mythology and later the daimons of Hellenistic religion and philosophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon

A baetyl, literally “house of god” is a sacred stone (sometimes believed to be a meteorite) that was venerated and thought to house a god or deity. The most famous example is the Omphalos stored in the Temple of Apollo at the Greek town of Delphi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baetyl

In Greek mythology, deities referred to as chthonic (θɒnɪk) or chthonian (θoʊniən) were gods or spirits who inhabited the underworld or existed in or under the earth, and were typically associated with death or fertility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chthonic_deities

Goddess on the Throne is a terracotta figurine found at the site of the Tjerrtorja spinning mill in Pristina, the capital city of Kosovo, in 1956. The seated terracotta figure is a well-preserved specimen of small Neolithic plastic Vinča culture (also known as Turdas culture in Kosovo).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goddess_on_the_Throne

The Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük is a baked-clay, nude female form seated between feline-headed arm-rests.

It is generally thought to depict a corpulent and fertile Mother goddess in the process of giving birth while seated on her throne, which has two hand rests in the form of feline (lioness, leopard, or panther) heads in a Mistress of Animals motif.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seated_Woman_of_%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk

Cybele is an Anatolian mother goddess; she may have a possible forerunner in the earliest neolithic at Çatalhöyük.

She is Phrygia's only known goddess, and likely, its national deity. Greek colonists in Asia Minor adopted and adapted her Phrygian cult and spread it to mainland Greece and to the more distant western Greek colonies around the sixth century BC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybele

The Lady of Elche is a limestone bust that was discovered in 1897, at La Alcudia, an archaeological site on a private estate two kilometers south of Elche, Spain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_of_Elche

The Dolmen of Guadalperal, also known as the Treasure of Guadalperal and as the Spanish Stonehenge for its resemblance to the English Stonehenge, is a megalithic monument dating from between 2000 and 3000 BC in Peraleda de la Mata, a town in the region of Campo Arañuelo in eastern Extremadura, Spain. The monument is within the Valdecañas reservoir in the Tagus River and is only visible when the water level allows it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolmen_of_Guadalperal

The Hohle Fels is a cave in the Swabian Jura of Germany that has yielded a number of important archaeological finds dating from the Upper Paleolithic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohle_Fels

Attis was the consort of Cybele, in Phrygian and Greek mythology. His priests were eunuchs, the Galli, as explained by origin myths pertaining to Attis castrating himself.

Attis was also a Phrygian vegetation deity. His self-mutilation, death, and resurrection represents the fruits of the earth, which die in winter only to rise again in the spring. According to Ovid's Metamorphoses, Attis transformed himself into a pine tree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attis

Svetovit, also known as Sventovit and Svantovit amongst other variants, is the god of abundance and war, and the chief god of the Slavic tribe of the Rani, and later of all the Polabian Slavs. His organized cult was located on the island of Rügen, at Cape Arkona, where his main temple was also located.

According to the descriptions of medieval chroniclers, the statue representing this god had four heads, a horn and a sword, and to the deity himself were dedicated a white horse, a saddle, a bit, a flag, and eagles. Once a year, after the harvest, a large festival was held in his honor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svetovit

Zalmoxis is a divinity of the Getae and Dacians (a people of the lower Danube), mentioned by Herodotus in his Histories Book IV, 93–96, written before 425 BC. Said to have been so called from the bear's skin in which he was clothed as soon as he was born.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zalmoxis

The name poppy goddess is often used for a famous example of a distinctive type of large female terracotta figurine in Minoan art, presumably representing a goddess, but not thought to be cult images, rather votive offerings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppy_goddess

Minoan religion was the religion of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization of Crete:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_religion

The Hypogeum of Ħal Saflieni is a Neolithic subterranean structure dating to the Saflieni phase (3300 – 3000 BC) in Maltese prehistory, located in Paola, Malta. It is often simply referred to as the Hypogeum (Maltese: Ipoġew), literally meaning “underground” in Greek.

The Hypogeum is thought to have been a sanctuary and necropolis, with the estimated remains of more than 7,000 people documented by archeologists, and is among the best preserved examples of the Maltese temple building culture that also produced the Megalithic Temples and Xagħra Stone Circle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%A6al_Saflieni_Hypogeum

A river valley civilization is an agricultural nation or civilization situated beside and drawing sustenance from a river. A river gives the inhabitants a reliable source of water for drinking and agriculture. Some other possible benefits for the inhabitants are fishing, fertile soil due to annual flooding, and ease of transportation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_valley_civilization

A proto-city is a large, dense Neolithic settlement that is largely distinguished from a city by its lack of planning and centralized rule. The term mega-sites is also used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-city

A toilet god is a deity associated with latrines and toilets. Belief in toilet gods – a type of household deity – has been known from both modern and ancient cultures, ranging from Japan to ancient Rome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_god

A marae (in New Zealand Māori, Cook Islands Māori, Tahitian), malaʻe (in Tongan), meʻae (in Marquesan) or malae (in Samoan) is a communal or sacred place that serves religious and social purposes in Polynesian societies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marae

Nan Madol is an archaeological site adjacent to the eastern shore of the island of Pohnpei, now part of the Madolenihmw district of Pohnpei state in the Federated States of Micronesia in the western Pacific Ocean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nan_Madol

A big man is a highly influential individual in a tribe, especially in Melanesia and Polynesia...The big man has a large group of followers, both from his clan and from other clans. He provides his followers with protection and economic assistance, in return receiving support which he uses to increase his status.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_man_(anthropology)

The Meadowcroft Rockshelter is an archaeological site which is located near Avella in Jefferson Township, Pennsylvania. The site is a rock shelter in a bluff overlooking Cross Creek (a tributary of the Ohio River), and contains evidence that the area may have been continually inhabited for more than 19,000 years. If accurately dated, it would be one of the earliest known sites with evidence of a human presence and continuous human occupation in the New World.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meadowcroft_Rockshelter

The Mnjikaning Fish Weirs are one of the oldest human developments in Canada. These fishing weirs were built by the first nations people well before recorded history, dating to around 4500 BP during the Archaic period in North America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnjikaning_Fish_Weirs

Orenda is the Haudenosaunee name for a certain spiritual energy inherent in people and their environment. It is an “extraordinary invisible power believed by the Iroquois Native Americans to pervade in varying degrees in all animate and inanimate natural objects as a transmissible spiritual energy capable of being exerted according to the will of its possessor.” Orenda is a collective power of nature's energies through the living energy of all natural objects: animate and inanimate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orenda

The Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) is the modern archaeological designation for a particular Middle Bronze Age civilisation of southern Central Asia, also known as the Oxus Civilization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bactria%E2%80%93Margiana_Archaeological_Complex

The Rollright Stones are a complex of three Neolithic and Bronze Age megalithic monuments near the village of Long Compton, on the borders of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollright_Stones

The Dolmen of Menga is a megalithic burial mound called a tumulus, a long barrow form of dolmen, dating from 3750–3650 BCE approximately. It is near Antequera, Málaga, Spain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolmen_of_Menga

Phyle is an ancient Greek term for tribe or clan. Members of the same phyle were known as symphyletai meaning ‘fellow tribesmen’. During the late 6th century BC, Cleisthenes organized the population of Athens in ten phylai (tribes), each consisting of three trittyes (“thirtieths”), with each trittys comprising a number of demes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyle

A sept is a division of a family, especially of a Scottish or Irish family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sept

In Greek mythology, maenads were the female followers of Dionysus and the most significant members of his retinue, the thiasus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maenad

The battlefield of the Tollense valley is a Bronze Age archaeological site in the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern at the northern edge of the Mecklenburg Lake District...Thousands of bone fragments belonging to many people have been discovered along with further corroborative evidence of battle; current estimates indicate that perhaps 4,000 warriors from Central Europe fought in a battle on the site in the 13th century BC.

As the population density was approximately 5 people per square kilometer (13 people per square mile), this would have been the most significant battle in Bronze Age Central Europe known so far and makes the Tollense valley currently the largest excavated and archaeologically verifiable battle site of this age in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollense_valley_battlefield

Old Croghan Man is a well-preserved Irish Iron Age bog body found in June 2003.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Croghan_Man

The Jiroft culture, also known as the Intercultural style or the Halilrud style, is an early Bronze Age (3rd millennium BC) archaeological culture, located in the territory of present-day Sistan and Baluchestan and Kermān Provinces of Iran.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiroft_culture

Olorgesailie is a geological formation in East Africa, on the floor of the Eastern Rift Valley in southern Kenya, 67 kilometres (42 mi) southwest of Nairobi along the road to Lake Magadi. It contains a group of Lower Paleolithic archaeological sites.

Olorgesailie is noted for the large number of Acheulean hand axes discovered there that are associated with animal butchering. According to the National Museums of Kenya, the finds are internationally significant for archaeology, palaeontology, and geology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olorgesailie

The Saint-Martin-de-Corléans Megalithic Area is an archaeological site that is considered of major importance for the study and knowledge of European prehistory and protohistory, located in the Saint-Martin-de-Corléans district of Aosta, Italy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Martin-de-Corl%C3%A9ans_Megalithic_Area

The Great Pyramid of Cholula, also known as Tlachihualtepetl (Nahuatl for “constructed mountain”), is a complex located in Cholula, Puebla, Mexico. It is the largest archaeological site of a pyramid (temple) in the world, as well as the largest pyramid by volume known to exist in the world today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Cholula

The Izhorians are a Finnic indigenous people native to Ingria. Small numbers can still be found in the western part of Ingria, between the Narva and Neva rivers in northwestern Russia. Although in English oftentimes sharing a common name with the Ingrian Finns, these two groups are distinct from one another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izhorians

The Selk'nam genocide was the systematic extermination of the Selk'nam people, one of the four indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego archipelago, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selk%27nam_genocide

Hero cults were one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion. In Homeric Greek, "hero" (ἥρως, hḗrōs) refers to the mortal offspring of a human and a god. By the historical period, however, the word came to mean specifically a dead man, venerated and propitiated at his tomb or at a designated shrine, because his fame during life or his unusual manner of death gave him power to support and protect the living.

A hero was more than human but less than a god, and various kinds of minor supernatural figures came to be assimilated to the class of heroes; the distinction between a hero and a god was less than certain, especially in the case of Heracles, the most prominent, but atypical hero.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_hero_cult

Sacred groves, sacred woods, or sacred forests are groves of trees that have special religious importance within a particular culture. Sacred groves feature in various cultures throughout the world.

These are forest areas that are, for the most part, untouched by local people and often protected by local communities. They often play a critical role in protecting water sources and biodiversity, including essential resources for the groups that protect them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_grove

The first is this one from a bloke called Paul Kedrosky: Life Under Two: Debt, Deficits, and the AI Discontinuity

While I agree with much of the basic premise of his article, there are parts where I think it goes astray.

The author points out that economic growth in the United States has slowed down in recent years. In the past, growth used to average over three percent per year, minimum. However, in recent years, US growth has averaged under two percent, hence the title of the post.

The author then goes on argue that this slowdown is key to many of the social and political phenomena that we’ve been witnessing over the past few years in the United States. As he describes:

This shift from robust to modest growth affects...everything. It is behind, in large part:

• The rise of populism

• Anti-immigrant sentiment

• DOGE

• A return to tariffs

• Soaring U.S. deficits and debt

The author points out that, although this slowdown seems relatively small in degree, it has huge impacts:

The difference between 3% and 2% annual growth is stark. At the higher rate, over ten years, you have:

• $3.36 trillion larger economy

• $3.7 trillion more in tax revenue

• 6 million more jobs

• Significantly higher real incomes

The gap directly affects opportunities, wage growth, tax revenue, social services, health care, solvency, and optimism about the future. Growing quickly and being awash in income makes people optimistic about the future; the opposite does...the opposite.

Critics of capitalism have long pointed out that capitalism requires growth because the system is structurally designed though its own internal logic to concentrate wealth into fewer and fewer hands. However, if there is growth, living standards can continue to rise at the margins for most people which justifies the grotesque inequality engendered by the system.

In the conventional formulation, the staggering fortunes of these magnates are justified as a way of producing higher living standards for the masses, and any constraint on their wealth or prerogatives, the argument goes, will cause living standards to fall for all of us, not just for them. This justification, however, relies on continued growth.

However, without this reliable growth, people fight amongst themselves for scarce resources leading to ever-increasing antagonism. And this leads to one of the core features of the MAGA movement: zero-sum thinking.

Under zero-sum thinking, any gain for someone necessarily means a loss for someone else. This has been identified as a core feature of Trump’s world view, and hence of the entire MAGA movement (my emphasis):

Americans built their self-image and expectations around decades of strong growth, trusting each generation would surpass the previous one. Sub-2% growth erodes this assurance, shifting psychology from abundance toward scarcity, and even zero-sum thinking. When people don't see abundance they stop sharing. And Americans have stopped sharing.

The most obvious expression of this thinking is with global trade. Trade is commonly seen as the quintessential positive-sum game in which all parties benefit from repeated interactions—the exact opposite of a zero-sum game. However, Trump has repeatedly said that countries which have a positive trade deficit with the US are “ripping us off.” A deficit means the US is somehow being “cheated” and this explains the logic behind sky-high tariffs. “They took our jobs,” goes the refrain, as if there were a fixed pool of jobs in the world.

This perception underlies everything in the MAGA world view. Under this view, if immigrants are getting anything at all, then Americans must be being deprived of those exact same things. If a refugee or welfare beneficiary receives any benefits whatsoever, it must be taken away from American citizens. If black person gets a job, it must have been taken away from a more qualified white person who rightfully deserved that job instead (which is portrayed as “DEI policies”). Trump claimed that hurricane relief aid destined for victims of hurricanes in North Carolina was being diverted to immigrants instead, leading to militias attacking FEMA workers and death threats against meteorologists. But all of this is fundamentally a reflection of zero-sum thinking.

This perception even applies to things like status: if women rise in status, it necessarily means that men’s standing must fall. That is, status is conserved: there is no such thing as everybody benefiting. There cannot be a win-win. That concept is utterly foreign to the MAGA—and to the conservative—mentality. My gain is your loss, and your loss is my gain, period. And they can only gain at the expense of someone else—someone they see as their enemy (women, foreign, gays, “radical leftists,” etc.):

In her 2024 memoir, Freedom, former German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, wrote of the then US president, Donald Trump:

“He assessed everything from the perspective of the real-estate developer he had been before entering politics. Each piece of property can be allocated once. If he didn’t get one, he got another. That’s how he saw the world. For him, all countries were in competition, and the success of one meant the failure of another. He didn’t believe that cooperation could increase prosperity for everyone.”

Now consider the following ideas that have been all too common in recent American political rhetoric:

• If other countries grow wealthier, then the United States must grow poorer.

• If immigrants win, then residents must lose.

• If women win, then men must lose.

• If gay people win, then straight people must lose.

• If transgender people win, then cisgender people must lose.

Those propositions have two things in common: (1) they all are examples of zero-sum thinking, and (2) they are all false.

Despite what politicians claim and often do, society is not zero-sum (London School of Economics)

While they may be false, they are increasingly accepted by more and more Americans leading to a “crabs-in-a-bucket” mentality. This Guardian profile of voters in Youngstown, Ohio includes an interview with a worker and union official laid off from her job in an automobile plant:

[Sonja] Woods, like many in Youngstown, sympathises with Trump’s zero-sum view of the world – that if one group is benefiting, it is usually at the expense of another. Seeing Afghan refugees move into government-subsidised housing when she had to finance her move to Kentucky infuriated her. Reading about Biden’s plans to forgive student debt when she paid off her daughter’s student loans in full struck her as deeply unfair…

The article goes on to note that, despite securing a new high-tech job due to Biden’s economic policies, she planned to vote against him:

She was unwilling to give the Biden administration much credit for spurring clean-energy businesses like her current employer, and she was too angry at GM to place much, if any, blame on Trump for allowing the old plant to close. What she saw, rather, was a general indifference from the political class, especially now that Ohio is no longer regarded as a swing state. “Nobody showed up in Youngstown this time, not Trump or Kamala,” she observed. “There are a lot of bitter people, and I’m one of them.”

‘There are a lot of bitter people here, I’m one of them’: rust belt voters on why they backed Trump again despite his broken promises (The Guardian)

Angry, bitter people—these are the core constituency of the MAGA movement. And, in many cases, they have reasons to be angry. But instead of trying to make her life and the lives of people in her community better, she, like many Americans, has instead embraced the politics of resentment and destruction.

The Trump administration’s single-minded obsession with brutalizing and terrorizing immigrants is also very much in line with this zero-sum thinking, as Kedrosky points out (my emphasis):

With rapid expansion, foreign competition and immigration offer benefits. Displaced domestic workers can easily transition to new sectors, and immigrants fill labor shortages. But once growth falters, everything goes into reverse.

Losing one's job and hoping that the economy can handle it feels like a bad bet. Workers displaced by trade struggle to find comparable opportunities. Communities undergoing rapid demographic shifts feel resource pressure. Immigration restrictions and higher tariffs become politically attractive means to maintain existing conditions. They are zero-sum responses to scarcity, predictable during Life Under Two.

Immigration restrictions and tariffs are predictable, zero-sum responses to scarcity… Lower growth explains rising political polarization. When growth was strong, expansive revenues funded both new programs and tax cuts. Rising wages benefited workers and shareholders alike, making immigration economically beneficial.

Under slower growth, policies become inherently competitive. Tax cuts reduce funding for public programs. Wage increases for some imply job losses for others. Immigrants are seen as competition for jobs, even when they are not…

Kedrosky further ties this to the drive for budget cuts, including the farcical “department of government efficiency" spearheaded by unelected oligarch Elon Musk.

Indeed, as I’ve often pointed out, the conservative/libertarian view of economics is that money is an inherently scarce resource and there is a limited pool of it in the world. Thus, we “cannot afford” to do the things we want or need to do, and if money is diverted to one purpose, it must necessarily be taken away from something else. From this perspective, the money that the government collects in taxes is taken away from “taxpayers” in a zero-sum contest for limited funds. This is why “small government” is inherently better in their view.

This—utterly incorrect—view of money is what’s behind the notion that eviscerating the federal government leads to “savings” which will somehow benefit the “taxpayers.” However, as MMT accurately describes, there is no more a scarcity of money than there is a scarcity of points in a basketball game—the only limitation is the amount of real resources we have to accomplish all the things we want to do. Furthermore, “taxpayer money” does not fund federal spending—it is new money spent into the economy providing a net-benefit for all, even for the rich (i.e. it is positive sum). And the delta between what is taxed and what is spent is new money added to the economy which is vital for growth. The government issues “debt” in the form of Treasury bonds to help mitigate this delta and constrain inflation, but it is not “borrowing” in the sense that you or I do it—it is the creation of new savings assets.

However, “genius” Musk is apparently too dense, ignorant, or obstinate to understand these facts, which is why his cuts to the federal government have “saved” very little money, delivered no benefits whatsoever, and may have actually cost money in real terms (and has cost lives as well). Cutting government spending shrinks the economy; it does not expand it, and much of government activities underpin economic growth, they do not restrict it in any way. We’ve known this for years.

The article also argues that a low-growth economy has cultural consequences as well. The pervasiveness of gambling in every walk of life, the desire to make a killing, the rise of “hustle culture” and the lionization of entrepreneurs—these have long been parts of the capitalist mindset, but they have become supercharged in recent years. This is because, when legitimate efforts like working hard and playing by the rules no longer offer any hope for a better future, all you can do is gamble and hope you end up as one of the few lucky “winners” rather than the rapidly expanding pool of “losers” in the new zero-sum economy (my emphasis):

It should come as no surprise the rise on non-economic thinking predicated on lottery assets, like crypto. Unlike orthodox financial instruments, they don't represent a claim on productive output. They are, if anything, the negation of orthodox claims, a repudiation of the old way of doing things, pure price reflexivity.

This is understandable in a world where people have lost faith in economic growth. Why wait? Find things that go up and chase after them. We see this in the rise of crypto, of sports betting, of YOLO-ing meme stock-chasing Reddit bros, and more. What they have in common is impatience in the orthodox system ever working for them. And having lost faith in the system itself, institutional distrust becomes a baked-in feature of what they lust after.

You can think of them as a kind of ironic commentary on Life Under Two itself. Instruments are increasingly divorced from the system, acting almost as jokes in a surrealist play about what happens when nothing economic can happen anymore. They are what happens when money seeks returns divorced from economic foundations, turning inward on itself. We should expect even more of this kind of behavior...

This necessity of gambling in order to get ahead is also what’s behind the rise of house prices. Shelter—a basic human need—is turned into an asset commodity under capitalism, and the incentive for any asset is to make sure its price goes up in perpetuity and doesn’t fall. It’s also a tenet of neoliberal capitalism that people always follow “incentives.”

Seen from this perspective, the rise in house prices is exactly what one would expect under this system, despite the “abundance liberals” attempt to blame “NIMBYs and zoning” and argue that people should somehow—just in this instance—voluntarily act contrary to their economic incentives. When work no longer pays, holding on to appreciating assets becomes the only viable route to prosperity, thus people will do anything to make sure that asset continues to appreciate, even if it hollows out society and screws over everyone else.

Bizarrely, towards the end of the article Kedrosky seems to imply that AI could offer us a way out of this situation. Indeed, AI has been seen by its proponents as a miracle technology (along with electric cars, batteries and solar panels) to usher in a new golden age of economic growth greater than ever before.

However, there is evidence that AI is making the world more zero-sum, not less. The job market for recent college graduates in the past few years has been one of the worst ever seen, with unemployment rates higher among recent grads than the economy as a whole. Even people in the media have started to notice, and AI might be one of the culprits along with economic uncertainty caused by tariffs. Even “abundance liberal” Derek Thompson admits, “This really is a hard time to be a young person.”

Derek Thompson

Young People Face a Hiring Crisis. AI Is Making It Worse.

This is a hard time to be a young person looking for a job. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates has spiked to recession levels, while the overall jobless rate remains quite low. By some measures, the labor market for recent grads hasn’t been this relatively weak in many decades. What I've called the “new g…

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a year ago · 298 likes · 20 comments · Derek Thompson

And that brings us to two major points.

One is that this increasingly zero-sum view of the world is not confined to the United States. Nor is it random or unexpected. One of the major findings from recent studies is that generations who grew up under negative economic conditions and lower growth have a much more zero-sum view of the world than generations who grew up under more favorable economic conditions and higher growth (my emphasis):

Among the most striking Harvard findings was the discovery that there is a strong relationship between the extent to which someone is a zero-sum thinker, and the economic environment they grow up in.

If someone’s formative years were spent against a backdrop of abundance, growth and upward mobility, they tend to have a more positive-sum mindset, believing it is possible to grow the pie rather than just redistribute portions of it. People who grew up in tougher economic conditions tend to be more zero-sum and sceptical of the idea that hard work brings success. These attitudes are perfectly rational.

The pattern holds whether you look at people who grew up at the same time but in countries with varying economic fortunes, or different generations who grew up in the same places but against a shifting economic backdrop. Every five to 10 years, the World Values Survey asks people in dozens of countries where they would place themselves on a scale from the zero-sum belief that “people can only get rich at the expense of others”, to the positive-sum view that “wealth can grow so there’s enough for everyone”.

The average response among those in high-income countries has become 20 per cent more zero-sum over the last century. Moreover, two distinct rises in the prevalence of zero-sum attitudes have coincided with two slowdowns in gross domestic product growth, one in the 1970s and another in the past two decades.

Are we destined for a zero-sum future? (Financial Times)

According to this same research, younger generations are significantly more zero-sum in their outlook than their older counterparts. Is it so surprising, then, that are becoming more amenable to far-right ideologies that pit people and generations against one another?

One of the paper’s more stunning takeaways concerned the trait’s age-related patterns. “There’s a very stark figure in the paper that shows younger generations in the U.S. are significantly more zero-sum than older generations,” [paper author Stefanie] Stantcheva said… “If there’s been more growth, more mobility in the first 20 years of your life, we find it’s associated with being significantly less zero-sum,” Stantcheva summarized. “So in places like the U.S. or Continental Europe, where things used to be better in terms of mobility, the older generations are a lot less zero-sum.”

Why are we so divided? Zero-sum thinking is part of it. (Harvard Gazette)

And the second point is that the slowdown in GDP growth appears to be global, as the graph below illustrates:

GDP growth (annual %) (The World Bank)

OECD members GDP Growth Rate (Macrotrends)

The trend is clear: the whole world is slowing down. While this may seem minimal, think what we’ve seen during this same time period: the explosive, astonishing growth of China and the fall of Communism adding many additional countries and millions of people to the global economy. We’ve seen the rise of countries like Brazil, Russia, India, South Korea, Vietnam, Turkey, Mexico, Poland, and many others during this era yet, in the aggregate, growth rates for the global economy as whole have hardly budged.

What this means is that the scarcity mindset is increasingly dominating global political discourse which explains the rise of anti-immigration parties all over the world. Although Kedrosky’s post confines itself to the United States, all of the things he mentions are increasingly dominating politics worldwide, especially ones which had previously enjoyed abundant economic growth like Western Europe and parts of Asia. People’s attitudes are shaped by their relative status, not their absolute status, which is why richer countries seem to be more vulnerable to far-right populism. For their part, the populists are responding with carefully crafted messages stoking fear and resentment toward “others” as the source of all society’s problems.

What it also implies is that, if this is indeed the “new normal,” then successive generations will become more and more zero-sum going forward, which will pave the way for ever more repressive political movements and possibly a wholesale rejection of democracy and pluralism itself. It also means that, due to the dynamics of capitalism—absent renewed growth or a turn toward socialism—corporations will increasingly strip mine society to maintain their profits, driving living standards down even further feeding the zero-sum mindset in a feedback loop.

In fact, there is evidence this is already happening. During the golden age of capitalism, stock market gains came almost exclusively from economic growth. But according to paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, from 1989 to 2017, only 25% of gains came from economic growth, while 40% came from shifting wealth from workers to shareholders:

Why does the stock market rise and fall? From 1989 to 2017, the real per capita value of corporate equity increased at a 7.2% annual rate. We estimate that 40% of this increase was attributable to a reallocation of rewards to shareholders in a decelerating economy, primarily at the expense of labor compensation. Economic growth accounted for just 25% of the increase, followed by a lower risk price (21%) and lower interest rates (14%). The period 1952–88 experienced only one-third as much growth in market equity, but economic growth accounted for more than 100% of it.

Where do stock market returns come from? (Marginal Revolution)

But what is the reason we are seeing this slowdown in the first place? And can anything be done about it?

2.

And that brings me to the next column from someone calling themselves “The Honest Sorcerer:”

The Honest Sorcerer

So This is How the Oil Age Ends

The age of oil ends when new oil becomes too expensive for buyers to buy, and at the same time too costly for producers to extract — not when a suitable replacement is found and deployed at scale. Recent data from S&P Global shows that oil&gas capital investment costs have surged to new heights globally, even as the …

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a year ago · 143 likes · 58 comments · The Honest Sorcerer

Back in the day, the Collapse subreddit on Reddit used to be a place you could go to find serious academic research and intelligent conversations regarding the future of society. Now it’s just a wasteland of random bad news along with toxic whining and complaining.

But back then, one common topic of discussion was what might happen to society if the inability to increase energy inputs caused economic growth to falter or even decline.

The more sober and intelligent commenters back then recognized that declining energy reserves would not cause the economy to suddenly collapse overnight, as many of the more lurid and sensationalist commenters argued. Instead, it would lead to a gradual—almost imperceptable—slowdown in economic growth as the energy return on investment ratio relentlessly crept higher and higher1.

What that would mean was a world of permanently slower—or even nonexistent—economic growth. The discussions focused on whether this would cause a social regression as well once economic growth—simply assumed as a given under capitalism—started to slow down or even reverse.

Even back then, there were people with enough intelligence and foresight to predict what would most likely happen, and what they described was uncannily similar to what we are experiencing today—that is, what Paul Kedrosky described above as Life Under Two. Absent economic growth, they argued, we would once again revert to a zero-sum game where one individual or group could only benefit at the expense of another. This would, in turn, make people increasingly mean, uncooperative, intolerant, vengeful, and violent.

This whole civilization was built around cheap fossil fuels, and after the Great Depression of the 1930’s: oil. With the slow agony of the oil age, and as global economic growth turns into stagnation then decline, the longest era of rising prosperity in human history comes to an end. Oil production has effectively hit a high plateau and failed to rise meaningfully over a decade now, even as world population grew by 10% during the same time period.

Considering the rise in energy demand of extracting petroleum over the past decade, this stagnation translated into a steep loss of oil products used per capita. Since the production of just about anything (from fish to solar panels) involves oil, the average world citizen has got poorer and poorer over the past decade. As for what to expect, hear out Dr Tim Morgan, former head of research at Tullett Prebon:

“If population numbers remain on their established trajectory of continuing (but decelerating) increase, this would leave the World’s average person some 34% poorer in 2050 than he or she is today. At the same time, this person’s real cost of necessities is likely to carry on rising at a rate of about 2.2% annually. Together, these trends imply that the affordability of discretionary (non-essential) products and services will contract by about 80% over the coming twenty-five years.”

Let that sink in.

The chart below explains it all. We’re already flatlining in world oil production. What happens when we move further to the right?

Based on this information, we know the following facts:

• World GDP is declining.

• Growth is slowing.

• Oil production is peaking.

• Zero-sum thinking is gaining in popularity worldwide, leading to the rise of the far-right.

Are all of these things related? The question back in the day was whether the end of growth would bring about major social and political upheaval. We appear to be seeing the exact type of politics that many predicted back then as the worst-case scenario: the recrudescence of zero-sum thinking and the scapegoating and brutalization of vulnerable minorities as the solution.

There is a book written by political economist Benjamin Friedman called “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.” It’s a long book with a simple premise: Economic growth was essential for the moral gains the world has made over the past couple of centuries (e.g. the outlawing of slavery, women’s suffrage, less violence, increasing tolerance, representative democracy, equality under the law, etc.). But what happens when that growth stops? And what happens if growth goes away forever due to declining reserves of non-renewable energy that take millions of years to replenish? What if AI and batteries fail to magically reignite growth like their proponents claim, or even make things worse? After all, AI cannot increase real resources—in fact, it actually consumes more resources, in some cases, vastly more.

Most historians attribute the Enlightenment to a sea change in intellectual attitudes with no further connection to underlying material conditions. In this view, it was just an inexplicable change that just happened to occur when and where it did with no deeper explanation. Many factors have been proposed like increasing literacy, but what if it was really expanding economies enabled by fossil fuels which allowed it to happen? For the first time since the dawn of agriculture, there were finally enough resources to go around for everybody leading to more generous and tolerant social attitudes. But if that was the case, and if the economy stops growing, will see a return to a preindustrial or agrarian world-view in terms of social values—that is, a wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment and an embrace of zero-sum thinking? And are we seeing the beginning of this already?2

What law is there that says the historical trajectory must be unidirectional?

In a recent post, Blair Fix makes the case that Fascist rhetoric is not actually new, but rather, old. That is, it is a reintroduction of pre-Enlightenment thinking and views back into modern political discourse (my emphasis):

Gazing at the totality of our linguistic evidence, one thing seems clear: fascism is overwhelmingly an ideology of the past. It is a modern label for a collection of dark ideas that have long plagued humanity. People believe in the ideals of humanism and the Enlightenment to the extent that this ideology delivers real benefits. And for several centuries, it did deliver the goods, obviously because rationality and evidence are a great way to solve problems. But lately, many anglophones have been losing faith in science, reason, and evidence, turning instead to darker ideas from the past.

For their part, scientists have noticed. For example, in 2018, linguist Steven Pinker felt compelled to devote a whole book to defending the ideals of the Enlightenment. It’s an enjoyable tome, filled with erudite philosophy and a plethora of evidence. But it’s also fundamentally condescending—a prime example of elite deafness. Pinker bends over backwards to demonstrate that today, life is good—that people have no reason to be angry. But wouldn’t the enlightened approach be to assume that folks do have a reason for turning to dark ideas…that for many people, life is not good?

Here, Pinker’s dismissal of inequality is an ironic example of dis-enlightenment among anglophone elites. Only in the lofty seclusion of the ivory tower could you pretend that the unfolding descent into oligarchy is unrelated to the rising tide of fascist rage. To say that nothing is wrong borders on satire. Neo-fascism is here, it is real, and it is terrifying. In other words, something has gone horribly wrong in anglophone society. Perhaps we should admit that so we can start looking for solutions.

The Deep Roots of Fascist Thought (Economics from the Top Down)

It is notable that the initial rise of Fascism in Europe occurred during a long period of zero growth and stagnation in the aftermath of World War One and the Great Depression3. Are the correlations made by Kedrosky above between slower economic growth and changing social and political attitudes in America (and recall that the far-right is gaining in popularity worldwide) merely a coincidence?

If these assumptions are correct, it could lead to every individual and group fighting tooth and-nail for their share of a shrinking pie—in other words, a true Hobbesian “war of all against all.” We’re already seeing this in the zero-sum world view promulgated by vulgar populists like Donald Trump in order to acquire despotic power. If this theory is correct, we’ll likely see these ideas spread and become more and more popular as time goes on. In fact, we’re seeing it already as mainstream parties fail to reignite economic growth no matter what they do. The far-right cannot either, which is why they focus exclusively on culture war topics and punishing “foreigners” and other vulnerable groups.

Is there any hope? Well, if population shrank in line with resources, it would be much, much easier to deal with a slowdown in growth in an enlightened, humane manner. And if we adopted a more compassionate, sharing attitude, making the best use of our (still relatively abundant) resources in order to benefit everyone, that would help too. Note that European countries with greater equality and better social services have proven more resilient to the lure of fascism than places like Russia and the United States (although even they are not immune).

But the problem is that this is called socialism. Socialism plays on the best instincts of human nature, not the basest instincts as does fascism, and therefore has a much worse track record of succeeding. Note that the current elites and their allies in the media are working mightily to repress burgeoning socialism wherever it occurs and trying to prevent the population from declining. Also note that both efforts are in line with Neo-fascist ideology, hence the idea that “fascism is capitalism in decay.” When capitalism falters, it is fascism—not socialism—that is the elites’ preferred alternative.

If that’s the case, then the choice we face really is between socialism or barbarism. Which will we choose? So far, it’s not looking too good...

I know, I know, I said no more debunking, but this is a BIG one. In fact, it may be the biggest and most destructive myth of all.

Previously, we looked at the overwhelming, unambiguous, incontrovertible, and indisputable evidence that Democrats are better at managing the capitalist economy than Republicans. Republican administrations have presided over lower growth, higher unemployment, and four of the last five recessions, and we are headed for yet another one even as we speak.

Democratic administrations, by contrast, have often presided over economic growth and expansion, including expansions that have increased wages and employment for the middle and lower classes. They’ve not increased as much as they should, of course, but it’s still far better than under Republicans. Even wealthy Americans make out better under the Democrats.

Nevertheless, despite these data, people who call themselves economic (or fiscal) conservatives still generally support Republicans. They will tell you this themselves. Why is that?

And what, exactly, does it mean to be an “economic (or fiscal) conservative?” Well, that’s a good question! People who describe themselves with that label rarely actually define exactly what that term means. Perhaps they think it’s self-evident.

So I’m going to go out on a limb here and speculate.

What They Believe

Fiscal conservatives believe in “sound finance,” which means that they want a “balanced” budget. That is, the federal government must take in enough money via taxation to match exactly what it spends—to the penny (except there are no more pennies). “I can’t spend money I don’t have, so the government shouldn’t, either,” goes the thinking. In other words, they believe that there is a limited supply of money in the world, and the federal government’s budget operates exactly the same way as a domestic household budget.

Spending money “you don’t have” is therefore “irresponsible” because you will run up “debt” (you’ll see why I’m putting these in scare quotes later). Thus, if the government runs up a lot of debt, it places an “intolerable burden” on future generations who will be “on the hook” to pay off our debts, with interest! Economic conservatives are usually obsessed with debt, particularly the size of the national debt. They like to use phrases like “running up the nation’s credit card” to emphasize this point. They think that governments can go “bankrupt” just like private businesses if they spend too much.

Fiscal conservatives believe that the government doesn’t have any money of its own, so it can only get money by taking it away (some would say, “stealing”) from the private sector. Thus, all the revenue the government collects in taxes is simply a dead weight loss to the “real” economy in a zero-sum situation. Because the money government spends ultimately comes from the private sector (i.e. “taxpayer money”), they think that government spending cannot add anything to the economy by definition—it can only subtract. Therefore they advocate for “small government,” and push for budget cuts.

Thus, the government must always be “responsible” and never spend a cent more than it “earns” via taxes, or it should even be “profitable” (that is, run a surplus). In short, the government ought to be run “like a business.” Since most business people tend to vote Republican, that may be why people associate Republicans with fiscal rectitude and “sound finance,” despite all the evidence to the contrary.

In a nutshell:

Government spending = bad

National debt = bad

Balanced budget = good

Small government = good

These, then, are the basic, fundamental principles of what it means to be a “fiscal conservative” as I understand them, and hopefully it is an accurate summary of their beliefs. This view was summed up by Margaret Thatcher:

“Let us never forget this fundamental truth: the State has no source of money other than money which people earn themselves. If the State wishes to spend more it can do so only by borrowing your savings or by taxing you more. It is no good thinking that someone else will pay—that “someone else” is you. There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers' money.”

However, these beliefs are based on a number of misconceptions.

Why this view is wrong

First, the federal government is nothing like a private business or household.

Economic conservatives have it precisely backwards. In reality, it is the private sector which has no money, and the public sector which is the source of all money. Therefore, the private sector needs to get its hands on the government’s money, not the other way around.

If you think about it for a second, this is obvious. The private sector cannot create new money—that is called counterfeiting, and it’s illegal. Therefore, since it cannot create new money, businesses can only be paid by customers and suppliers using legal tender or bank deposits which ultimately have to come from somewhere.

The only entities that can legally create money are the federal government itself via spending (state and local governments cannot do this), or by private intermediaries known as banks to whom the government has delegated that authority1. A bank is a very special type of business which is granted a license by the government, has an account at the Federal Reserve, is a member of FDIC, and so forth, which allows it to create new monetary reserves through the extension of bank credit, subject to certain restrictions and regulations.

So, unless the entity in question is a bank, it is the private sector which does not have any money, and the government which has all the money, either directly or through its designated private intermediaries, the banks.

This means that spending must logically come before taxation and borrowing, not after, otherwise there wouldn’t be sufficient money to tax or borrow. This chicken-and-egg cycle began so long ago that the original sequence was forgotten and eventually reversed. Sometimes this is expressed as S(TaB)—as opposed to (TaB)S—with ‘S’ representing the primacy of spending in this sequence and taxing and borrowing (TaB) necessarily following after.

Why does this matter? Because it necessarily leads to the conclusion that federal spending is ultimately not funded by taxes paid to the government. When the government authorizes spending, it is money spent into the system de novo which the government then reclaims a portion of via taxation, deliberately removing spending power from the public. It does this by transferring funds from your account to the government’s via keystrokes (and spends by reversing this operation).

Why does it do this? Well, there are several reasons.

A big one is to prevent too much money from being injected to the system which could cause inflation. Taxes provide the “fiscal space” for government spending. Another is to induce demand for the government’s currency (less important in advanced economies). Another is to redistribute a portion of wealth which is necessary for any society to function. Another is to account for externalities not priced into markets by taxing “bads” and subsidizing “goods.” Yet another is to reassure international investors and holders of the sovereign’s currency that the government can regulate the amount of the money in the system to keep it under control.

It also means that we are not dependent on billionaires to fund our federal spending like children begging for an allowance from their parents. We do not have to go to the billionaires, hat in hand, to politely ask for enough money to accomplish the things that we want our elected representatives to do for us (“please sir…”), despite what even people on the political left seem to believe. Money doesn’t grow on rich people.

It follows, then, that government spending is not a subtraction, but rather an addition to the domestic economy. This is why throttling back government spending never causes the economy to grow faster. In fact, it usually does the opposite—it induces a recession, lowers investment and economic growth, and increases unemployment.

Government spending accounts for nearly 40 percent of GDP (federal expenditures alone are about 23 percent). That’s not a bad thing—these are things that we’ve told our elected representatives we want them to do for us like keep us safe, build roads and other infrastructure projects, prevent people from becoming destitute, educate the public, provide health care, predict the weather, undertake basic scientific research, make sure our food supply is safe to eat, keep the lights on, make sure planes don’t crash, and a host of other things.

In fact, federal government deficits turn out to be private sector surpluses. This is not a theory—it is an empirical observation based on the rules of accounting (which is based on double-entry bookkeeping). Every liability is someone else’s asset—in other words, “the government’s red ink is our black ink.”

If, by contrast, the federal government is withdrawing more money via taxation than it spends back into the economy (i.e. it makes a “profit”), it really is withdrawing money from the system. The accounting identity described above still holds, meaning that the federal government’s surpluses are the private sector’s deficits. Its gain really is a net loss to the private sector.

When the federal government’s budget is “balanced,” it is not adding or subtracting any money to the domestic economy at all. That means that if the money supply is to grow, it is dependent on bank lending to do so, with all the problems that entails2.

When the federal government spends more than it taxes in any given year, then it “borrows” the difference. Fiscal conservatives assume that this “borrowing” is exactly the same as you or I going down to the bank or Payday Loan Store and taking out a loan. But that analogy is misleading.

Unlike you or I, the federal government issues its own currency so it does not need to “borrow” in order to spend. Instead, it issues Treasury Bills (T-Bills) in the equivalent amount for people to invest in. People voluntarily buy Treasuries because they want a safe asset to store their money, and the federal government will pay you interest for holding onto them. It’s a way of absorbing excess money in the system. The money to buy these Treasuries is ultimately dependent on government spending in a semi-closed loop within the financial system.

(This so-called “borrowing” is a holdover from the days when there was an artificial constraint on new money creation under the old currency conversion rules. Buying and selling bonds was also used by governments to manage interest rates.)

What this means is that the nation’s “debt” is merely assets held by the private sector (as well as government entities like central banks, both foreign and domestic).

Recall that every liability is someone else’s asset. This is an iron law of accounting. These assets are on the positive side of the ledger, meaning that they contribute to private sector wealth, not subtract from it. In fact, if you cut the national debt in half, you would cut national savings in half as well. Not only that, the interest paid on the national debt is paid to the private sector, increasing their net wealth, not taking away from it. It is “welfare” for the investor class. Thus, whatever they tell you, the “national debt” is nothing at all like your and my credit card debt3.

This was succinctly expressed by Abba Lerner back in the 1940s:

And while the government could take in more than it spends, this would inevitably lead to private sector deficits, and private entities—unlike national governments—cannot run deficits indefinitely. Unlike the federal government, they actually do need to make a profit. The “private sector” is not a single household or business—it is the sum total of all households and businesses in the country. And while a household has a limited lifespan, governments are permanent institutions that extend across generations. Confusing these is a basic category error.

The national debt could be paid off tomorrow if we wanted to—all it would take is moving money from one account to another— but it would extinguish a big portion of national savings in the process, probably also inducing a recession. In fact, every time the national debt has been paid off too quickly, a recession has immediately followed rather than an economic boom according to research by Frederick Thayer, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. The most recent example was the downturn at the end of Clinton’s second term.

So what I take “fiscally conservative” to mean is not spending more than you earn.

And while that may indeed be good advice for your private life, it’s not a good idea to run the federal government this way because the federal government is totally different. The government issues the currency and sets the rules of the game—it is the house in a casino, or the banker in Monopoly. And it definitely should not be run “like a business.” Private businesses are dedicated to profitable enterprises alone, and not everything that needs to be done is profitable. The things the government does—including spending and deficits—are what enable the private sector to make profits.

Thus we see that the public and private sectors are complimentary, not antagonistic, which is why the notion of “small government” makes no sense. The largest and most successful economies in the world with the highest living standards are all run by the world’s biggest and richest governments. The poorest economies in the world tend to have smaller, poorer, and weaker governments, but they are not more prosperous as a result.

Libertarian thought would have it that when the government shrinks, the private sector must grow by the same amount since it is no longer taking away “taxpayer money” from the public. But that is not what happens. In reality, when government shrinks, the private sector shrinks also. This has been known for a long time—we’ve seen it again and again. No national government has ever “shrunk” its way to prosperity4. This is called austerity, and it has a very poor track record of spurring economic growth.

At the end of the day, the only thing that matters are the conditions of the real economy—jobs, growth, inflation, unemployment, poverty, and so on. Everything else is just an accounting identity with no further significance. Think about it: in your lifetime, as well as mine, I’m willing to bet that the national debt has gone up, and gone down, several times. Has it affected your life in any way? Paying down the debt while allowing the actual economy to fall apart and workers to suffer makes no sense whatsoever. Obsessing over these accounting identities is counterproductive and pointless.

To both [John Maynard] Keynes and [Abba] Lerner it was evident that the state had the ability to promote full employment and a stable price level – and that it should use its powers to do so. If that meant that it had to take on a debt and (more or less temporarily) underbalance its budget – so let it be!

Public debt is neither good nor bad. It is a means to achieving two over-arching macroeconomic goals – full employment and price stability. What is sacred is not to have a balanced budget or running down public debt per se, regardless of the effects on the macroeconomic goals. If “sound finance”, austerity and a balanced budgets means increased unemployment and destabilizing prices, they have to be abandoned.

An MMT perspective on the public debt problem (Real World Economic Review)

Fiscal “Responsibility”

If you go online, you will inevitably see economic conservatives complaining that Republican politicians have abandoned “fiscal responsibility.” You will also see the opposite—people praising the Democrats for being “fiscally responsible” by paying down the debt, or balancing the federal budget.

The idea is that spending money is always bad, and paying down debt is always good, regardless of macroeconomic conditions.

But how “responsible” is it to NOT spend money, anyway?

If you’re suffering from cancer, is it “fiscally responsible” to not spend money “you don’t have” on medical treatments to regain your health? Is it better to save money at the cost of your life?

People take out loans much higher than their current income to go to school because they know that they will be better off because of it. Is it “fiscally responsible” to not get an education? In many instances, the answer is, “no.” Clearly it makes sense to invest in your “human capital” as an individual, just as it makes sense for a nation to invest in its own people. Doing otherwise in the name of “fiscal responsibility” is like eating your seed corn.

It is “fiscally responsible” to not spend any money on house maintenance, even as your house falls apart around you? Is it “fiscally responsible” not to spend money on exercise or preventative care, even as your health deteriorates? Is it “fiscally responsible” to not spend money on insurance so that you risk losing everything in case of misfortune? Is it “fiscally responsible” not to hire a lawyer if you’ve been wronged? There are a lot times where not spending money is hardly the responsible thing to do.

All of these are analogies for people who monomaniacally prioritize paying down “the debt” (which isn’t really a debt, as we’ve seen), or “balancing the budget” over everything else. As we’ve seen, balanced budgets take money out of the economy.

Why, then, is there so much hysteria surrounding the national debt and deficits? Simple—because it allows politicians to claim that the government is “broke,” and therefore it can’t do things for its citizens that polls routinely show most people want it to do. Instead, people have to resort to GoFundMe to beg for help from strangers on the internet when they get sick or injured and hope for the best (and where does that money come from?). They have to sink themselves into debt for education, health care, and child care. It doesn’t have to be that way.

The political importance of this was driven home to me by a recent article in The Guardian. It describes the terrible impact of the current government’s draconian and discretionary fiscal cutbacks on the lives and communities of people in rural California. Yet they still support President Trump, despite these devastating cuts, because they think that anything else would be “unsustainable.”

Bruce Ross, a Shasta county Republican, acknowledged the difficulties of seeing layoffs, but said he had been pleased with the direction of the administration.

“Everybody who lives up in north-eastern California knows folks who work for the Forest Service, or for federal agencies, and it’s tough for them. I think on a human level, that’s real,” Ross said. But, he added, he had seen a willingness on the part of the administration to listen when local officials have pushed back against proposed cuts, and the practical changes had ultimately, so far, been less severe than they initially seemed…Ross, who is also the secretary for the Shasta county Republican central committee, admitted there would probaly [sic] be pain as Trump enacts his agenda, but argued that was necessary to tackle the federal deficit.

“There’s a $2tn annual deficit with the federal government in Washington in a time of peace and a fairly strong economy,” he said. “How do you ever go about trying to balance that without being somewhat aggressive about actually cutting spending? It’s never going to be easy to do.”

(My emphasis) And:

Steve Barkley, a 74-year-old who lives in northern California’s Sierra foothills, said he felt confident in the president’s agenda, and wasn’t worried about any cuts to Medicare or social security.

“He’s the first candidate that was really saying the things that I wanted to hear, and promised to do the things that I want done, and he’s keeping his promises,” Barkley said, adding that he believed Trump’s recent actions ensure the longevity of those programs and boost the economy.

“I’m happy. I don’t expect anything to get done right away. It’s going to take time.”

Ross is hopeful that even with some short-term pain, Trump’s policies will ultimately improve the region…“I think that’s going to be good for northern California. It’s not just about money – it’s about what is their direction, and what are their goals? And just bluntly, they’re on our side,” he said.

“And again, look at the federal deficits and explain how that’s sustainable, and explain how that’s going to change in a way that doesn’t cause some dissension. It’s hard on any level. But I think long-term, it’s what the country needs.”

In California’s deep-red north, voters startled by pace of cuts – but they’re still backing Trump (The Guardian)

So now you can see the true agenda behind economic conservatism—it can get people to enthusiastically support the destruction and impoverishment of their own communities in order to “pay off the debt” and “balance the budget” (even as trillions in tax cuts are proposed for the wealthiest Americans). For them, it’s “short term pain for long-term gain,” just like Dave Ramsey told them to do with their own household budgets. As Stephanie Kelton notes:

Look around you. Look at our decrepit infrastructure. Look at our airports, our roads, our libraries, our schools, our train stations, and our public spaces. Look at our rural hospitals and overflowing emergency rooms. Look at the streets filled with homeless people. Look at our dilapidated small towns and blighted inner cities. Look at our child poverty and falling life expectancy. Does this look like a country that’s been spending too much money? People who regularly travel to Western Europe and Asia know the truth.

Slashing the government’s budget and paying off the national debt, then, is not a pathway to prosperity, nor is the debt an existential crisis, despite what everyone on the internet and in the media is telling you5. Neither is the budget deficit of particular concern. The deficit is merely the difference between what the federal government has spent into the economy and what it has chosen to withdraw via taxes. The national debt is the sum total of all past deficits, and corresponds to interest-bearing assets held by the private sector. In fact, the national debt need never be repaid, since it represents a major portion of our nation’s money supply.

So, for me, being truly “economically conservative” means paying attention to the real economic conditions on the ground rather than trying to somehow run government “like a business,” or prioritizing paying off a debt which we mostly owe to ourselves. Economic conservatism is based on a fundamental category error and not understanding how macroeconomic sectors interact. It’s just mistaken. It seems like most self-described “economic conservatives” are either making this basic error, or else basing their economic reasoning on their own emotions about debt rather than an understanding of how modern economies actually operate.

“No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have a health problem.”

—BEN SHAPIRO

Before we move on, I want to do one final debunking.

No, Social Security is not insolvent. No it is not unsustainable. No, it is not a Ponzi scheme.

If it is eliminated, or reduced, it will be entirely because of political decisions, and not fiscal constraints.

Now, I’m not an expert, or a policy wonk. But what follows is my understanding based on people who know a lot more about this topic than I do. So let’s get started. I’ll try to keep this simple.

1.

If you go on the internet, one of the primary reasons people are so angry about Social Security being potentially withdrawn or curtailed is because “they’ve paid into the system their whole lives,” or something similar. Your hear this all the time from people on Reddit, for example.

Every year when you pay your taxes, there’s a line in your income statement (called a W2 in the United States), showing how much money has been taken out of last year’s paycheck for Social Security.

In this conception, people think of it like a savings account. With a savings account, you sock away a portion of your income every month only to withdraw it at some point in the future. If you stash it in an account that yields interest or dividends, then that money grows over time. It’s your money—the money that you earned in the past. If someone suddenly came along and said you couldn’t access your bank account where you saved all your money, then of course you would be pissed off.

That’s not how Social Security works, however. But the perception that that’s how it works was deliberately encouraged by the system’s architects.

The idea that you’re simply getting your own money back is a “noble lie” that was deliberately sold to an American public hostile to anything remotely resembling “socialism.” The idea of getting “other people’s money”—or (*gasp*) redistribution—would be much harder to sell, they thought. And so they reasoned that people would be more likely to defend the program from attacks if they believed they were simply getting back their own money which they had paid into the system all along.

And, of course, the architects of Social Security were entirely right about that. But it’s still not how the system works.

2.

In reality, that money on your W2 form is paid into a dedicated revenue fund, and that fund pays out all the benefits to the people who are currently receiving checks from the Social Security program.

So, in fact, Social Security recipients are indeed getting “other people’s money.” They’re getting the money that current taxpayers paid in last year, and not the money they themselves paid into the system years ago. That money is “gone”—given to people who received benefits years ago. Taxes paid in 1980 went to 1981 recipients. In turn, your benefits will be paid for by future revenues.

Social Security is a federal program that was created under the Social Security Act of 1935. It was established as part of the New Deal by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a “dedicated revenue” in the form of a payroll tax. Today, employees and their employers each pay 6.2% of wages up to a taxable maximum of $176,100 (2025) into Social Security.

If you think about it, this makes sense. What about the very first people who received Social Security? Did they pay into the system their whole lives? Of course not! They couldn’t have—it was a new program. And even the people who received benefits for the first few decades of the program’s existence certainly could not possibly have paid in anywhere near what they received in total benefits.

That is, the government does not have to sock away or stockpile money in a savings account like you or I do in order to pay for stuff. They just do it.

Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with getting other people’s money. If you’re not living alone on a deserted island, then you’re constantly giving and receiving money all the time from people you’ve never met who also live in that society. If that offends you, then I assume you don’t have any sort of insurance. If you’ve paid into insurance and your house didn’t burn down or you didn’t get into an auto accident, then someone else ended up with “your” money. Did you go to a doctor this year? How many times? Most likely, someone else got some of “your” money this year (with a big chunk also going to health insurance CEOs and stockholders if you’re unlucky enough to live in the United States). Did you pay for 100% of that road you drove on? Ever been to a library?

But this is where the consternation lies. For most of its existence, the amount of money paid into Social Security has been sufficient to cover the number of people withdrawing from it. That means the amount of money the government is collecting (plus what it has saved in the trust fund which we’ll talk about in a bit) is sufficient for what it is required to pay out. This is because, typically, the number of workers outnumbers the number of retirees by a significant margin.

But that margin is rapidly shrinking due to demographics. The ratio of workers to retirees is decreasing. This means that there will eventually be less money coming in relative to what has to be paid out. This is ultimately because of falling birth rates, as the chart above demonstrates.

Which is why there is concern over whether the money will actually “be there” or not. It’s also why detractors sneeringly label it a “Ponzi scheme.”1

3.

It turns out that this demographic cliff was foreseen years ago. You can clearly see the fall off in birth rates in the chart above. By the nineteen-eighties, people were already worried about this, so they decided to do something to guarantee the “solvency” of the program in the future (which, as we’ll see later, is a myth).

Since the massive demographic of Baby Boomers was still working back then, they decided to hike the payroll tax and stash the money away in a so-called “trust fund” to ensure there would be enough money in the future. Sort of like saving up for a rainy day, except the “rainy day” in this case was when the Baby Boomers started to retire. The age at which you could collect benefits was also slowly raised, due to people living longer (a trend which, by the way, has reversed). The money socked away in the trust fund, combined with the revenue from payroll tax withholdings, pays out the benefits that people get every year by law.

The trust fund was supposed to guarantee the program’s “solvency” through at least 2060. However, it is now projected that this trust fund will be exhausted much earlier than anticipated—probably around 2034 or 2035. When the trust fund is exhausted, Social Security will only be authorized to pay out what it collects via payroll taxes, which means a reduction in benefits under the current paradigm.

Is this trust fund “real”? No and yes. It consists entirely of U.S. government debt, which means that it’s just claims by one part of the government on the rest of the government. So you could say that it’s just an accounting fiction. But it has important legal and political implications.

We’ve now reached the point where benefit payments are bigger than revenue from FICA. But for now, the Social Security Administration can maintain payments by drawing on the trust fund, with no immediate need for legislation to bail the system out.

But the reason projections fell short of what was required has to do with something you might not expect: inequality! What the National Commission on Social Security Reform (a.k.a. the Greenspan Commission) failed to anticipate was the astonishing rise in income inequality that has occurred since the Reagan years. What this has meant is that more and more income is not subject to the taxes which fund the program. More on that later.

4.

So is this a problem?

There are a few things to remember here. The first is that the choice to authorize payments from a specific, dedicated revenue source is simply a policy choice rather than a true financial constraint. That is, the payouts are constrained not by a lack of money, but rather by the way the program was initially set up. The legal authority to pay—which is determined by laws passed by Congress, is different than the financial ability to pay, as Stephanie Kelton describes:

1.) Legal Authority to Pay — Under current law, Social Security can only pay full scheduled benefits if there is enough earmarked funding to do so.

Put simply, there must be enough “cash” coming in via payroll tax withholdings or enough “cash” coming in plus “cash” in the Social Security Trust Fund to cover the full cost of paying benefits each year. If the trust funds run dry—i.e. are drawn down to zero—then the program doesn’t have the legal authority (from Congress) to pay full benefits. This would force automatic cuts under current law.

2.) Financial Ability to Pay — As Alan Greenspan explained under oath many years ago, the federal government cannot “run out of money.2”

One does not have to embrace Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to acknowledge that Congress has the financial ability to “create as much money as it wants and pay it to someone,” as Greenspan put it. Social Security is a federal program, authorized to pay benefits to eligible individuals—retirees, their dependents, and the disabled—under the rules established by Congress.

And here’s the most important part (my emphasis):

The reason there is so much anxiety about Social Security “running out of money” is that the authority to pay benefits is constrained by statute. If Congress changed the law to give Social Security permission to pay full scheduled benefits regardless of any earmarked source of funding, then the threat of automatic cuts would disappear…

If we were having an honest debate, we would acknowledge that Social Security can run out of statutory headroom to pay full scheduled benefits, but the money can always be made available. Alas, we’ve become trapped in an eternal tug-of-war over the program’s “solvency,” not unlike two desperate souls fighting over rocks in Dante’s Fourth Circle of Hell.

Everyone just accepts that the program is “running out of money,” so there’s a never-ending battle over the best way to shore up the program’s finances. It’s not the debate I want to have, but it’s the only one that gets any serious consideration…

The Lens

Elon Musk is the Reason Social Security is "Running Out of Money"

Before we dive in, let’s get one thing straight. Social Security is a federal program that was created under the Social Security Act of 1935. It was established as part of the New Deal by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a “dedicated revenue” in the form of a payroll tax. Today, employees and their employers each pay 6.2% of wages up to a taxable maximum of $176,100 (2025) into Social Security…

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2 years ago · 207 likes · 22 comments · Stephanie Kelton

That is, all it would take would be to pass a simple law stating that the program must pay out the required benefits regardless of how much money happens to be sitting around in some dedicated account somewhere. That’s it. As Warren Mosler put it, “government checks don’t bounce.”

It turns out we already do that for other programs. This Reddit post quotes Kelton’s book, The Deficit Myth, to make the point that all it would take is a policy decision to pay out benefits regardless of what is in a trust fund or any temporary revenue shortfalls, which is what we already do for Medicare Parts B and D:

…the decision to create a Social Security trust fund into which payroll taxes would be paid and from which old-age benefits would be paid out was an entirely political decision on the part of President Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1930s. The trust funds were created to provide citizens with the confidence that funds being deducted from their paychecks for payroll taxes (in an era before the introduction of federal income tax withholding) would eventually be paid out to them in the form of old-age benefits.

As Kelton points out…only three of the four Social Security and Medicare trust funds are subject to these fears that their future "insolvency" might prevent benefits from being paid. One of the two Medicare funds is not subject to these fears. In the legal language governing the Supplementary Medical Insurance fund (SMI)—commonly known as Medicare Parts B and D—“Congress has granted the legal authority to make ... payments” regardless of the cash balance of the trust fund. Kelton writes,

“Congress could in fact change the current law so that the same language applies [to the Social Security trust funds and to Medicare's Hospital Insurance fund]. That it hasn't done so is a political choice, not an economic one. You wouldn't know that by reading most newspapers, however, or by listening to most pundits. All we hear is that Social Security is going broke.” (168-169)

Joe Manchin, Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden all operate on the premises that (a) Social Security and Medicare payments can only be made from the trust funds, (b) those trust funds will eventually run dry, and (c) the purpose of reforms ought to be to push the point at which the trust funds run dry farther into the future. They do not entertain the notion that Congress should simply guarantee payments for Social Security and Medicare Hospital Insurance in the way that it already has for Medicare SMI.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mmt_economics/comments/vwlcak/democrats_approaches_to_social_security_and/

Here’s Kelton herself making the same point:

As the great Northwestern University economist Robert Eisner explained almost a quarter-century ago, Congress could always bestow the same legislative language on Social Security’s trust funds or even dispense with the trust funds altogether. They are, after all, “merely accounting entities.”

Instead of fretting over arbitrary numbers on a ledger, Eisner wanted people to understand that “Social Security faces no crisis now or in the future.” It cannot “go bankrupt.” It will be there as long as those who seek to undermine it don’t get their political way.

The Lens

What FDR and Two Former Fed Chairs Understood About Social Security

I’ve written quite a lot about Social Security over the years. Of course, I come at it from an MMT perspective, which means that I have never worried about the program’s “solvency” the way many other economists do. The fullest expression of my views can be found in chapter 6 of my book…

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4 years ago · 53 likes · 5 comments · Stephanie Kelton

So, why not do that? Well, if you wanted to kill off the program, you would certainly not do that. Instead, you would promote myths like it’s “going bankrupt” or that it’s a “Ponzi scheme” which would give you the perfect ammunition to destroy the program, which you wanted to do all along. And the entire media would play along because the media—even the so-called “liberal” media—is owned by billionaires and has always been hostile to anything that helps ordinary workers. You would constantly tell people over and over again that the money “won’t be there” when they retire, and repeat this lie endlessly so that it simply becomes the “conventional wisdom.”

But that doesn’t make it true!

Popular Information

EXCLUSIVE: Memo details Trump plan to sabotage the Social Security Administration

An internal Social Security Administration (SSA) memo, sent on March 13 and obtained by Popular Information, details proposed changes to the claims process that would debilitate the agency, cause significant processing delays, and prevent many Americans from applying for or receiving benefi…

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2 years ago · 1855 likes · 111 comments · Judd Legum

The only other concern would be the amount of real resources the economy is able to generate. As Kelton herself notes, if there is not enough “stuff” (i.e. goods and services) to buy relative to the purchasing power of the checks sent out, then it might make sense to reduce the benefits being paid. The concern is that having so many people out of the labor force might cause economic contraction, resulting in inflation. This is ultimately a question of the size of the entire economy, however, and not a question of whether one specific program has enough money allocated to it. Money can be moved around.

But, as Dean Baker has pointed out, that’s not the narrative we hear in the media. Instead, we’re being told that that future economic growth is going to be supercharged because of AI. If that’s true, then it’s obvious we will have both the real resources and the tax receipts to keep the program solvent while paying out 100 percent of the benefits for the foreseeable future.

The implication…is that AI will lead to a massive uptick in productivity growth. That would be great news from the standpoint of the economic problems that have been featured prominently in public debates in recent years.

Most immediately, soaring productivity would hugely reduce the risks of inflation. Costs would plummet as fewer workers would be needed in large sectors of the economy, which presumably would mean downward pressure on prices as well. (Prices have generally followed costs. Most of the upward redistribution of the last four decades has been within the wage distribution, not from labor to capital.)

A massive surge in productivity would also mean that we don’t have to worry at all about the Social Security “crisis.” The drop in the ratio of workers to retirees would be hugely offset by the increased productivity of each worker. (The impact of recent and projected future productivity growth already swamps the impact of demographics, but a surge in productivity growth would make the impact of demographics laughably trivial.)

https://rwer.wordpress.com/2023/05/04/google-ai-expert-warns-of-massive-uptick-in-productivity-growth-no-problems-with-social-security/

What people can’t seem to understand is that it’s not just the number of workers paying into the system, but also the productivity of those workers. If each worker is more productive over time, then incomes are higher, meaning that the amount of revenue is higher, regardless of the ratio of workers to retirees. Workers are a whole lot more productive now than in 1935.

Put another way, if the ratio of workers to retirees falls from 3:1 to 2:1 (as it is projected to do), and future workers are 1.5 times as productive, then the ratio is basically unchanged. This is one reason why Social Security is no more or less a Ponzi scheme than the entire capitalist economy itself3. So, if Social Security is in trouble, so is the entire economy. Its alleged “insolvency” is a choice, not a financial law of nature:

What would an MMT-informed approach to the "problem" of Social Security and Medicare look like?

First, we would have the U.S. recognize that there is no financial problem threatening the viability of Social Security and Medicare payments. As long as the U.S. economy is capable of producing the real resources (goods, services, health care) on which Social Security and Medicare benefits are spent, funding those benefits is not an economic issue. It's only a question of legal authority —and that's a political question.

Second, we would acknowledge that the Social Security and Medicare trust funds have outlived the political purpose for which FDR created them. We would say, "Thank you for your service," and Congress would change the law to guarantee payments regardless of the cash balance level of the trust funds—in effect, politically neutering them.

Third, we would then be able to take up the questions of closing tax loopholes on the rich, making the tax structure more progressive and reducing inequality in the distribution of income on their own merits.

5.

But even if we decided that we wanted to keep the trust fund exactly the way it is now, there’s still another way to ensure that there’s enough money to pay out 100 percent of the benefits for the foreseeable future.

Remember, I said that the reason the trust fund was unable to stockpile as much money as was required is because of extreme income inequality. Perversely, that same income inequality is now being used as an excuse to dismantle the program.

You see, as noted above, the payroll taxes which fund the program top off at $176,100. That means that the most it’s possible to collect from anyone—no matter how rich—is $10,912. That umbrella still covers most workers. But because some people are making so obscenely much more than that in our hourglass-shaped economy, that leaves record amounts of income uncollected by the payroll tax. This is what the Greenspan Commission failed to anticipate.

In 1937, when the payroll tax was first collected, it applied to about 92% of all earned income. By 2020, that figure had fallen to 83%, largely because of an increase in income inequality. Were the payroll tax to be restructured to cover 90% of earnings, as the Congressional Budget Office reported last year, that would produce an additional $670 billion in revenue over 10 years; raise it to cover all annual earnings over $250,000, the gain would be $1.2 trillion — all without cutting benefits by even a penny.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-11-24/how-many-errors-about-social-security-can-be-fit-into-a-single-article-slate-goes-for-a-record

A record share of earnings was not subject to Social Security taxes in 2021 (Economic Policy Institute)

Dean Baker describes how inequality and anemic wage growth have contributed to the issues with Social Security more than simply demographics (my emphasis):

A big part of this story is that productivity growth has been weaker than was projected. But an even larger part is that there has been a huge upward redistribution of income over this period. If wages had kept pace with productivity growth, they would be more than 60% higher than they are today.

This directly matters for Social Security’s finances for two reasons. The first is that a much larger share of wage income has gone over the payroll cap. The cap rises in step with average wages, not the typical worker’s wages. As a larger share of wage income went to those at the top, Wall Street types, CEOs and other top executives, and highly paid professionals, less was subject to the Social Security tax. In 1982. only 10% of wage income avoided taxation. Now it’s close to 18% of wage income. And since the turn of the century, a larger share of income has been going to corporate profits. This money also escapes taxation for Social Security.

There is also the issue that if wages had been growing more rapidly over the last half-century, tax revenue would be higher relative to benefit payments. Benefit payments after retirement are indexed to prices. If wages outpace prices, tax revenue increases relative to benefits. The Trustees calculate that a 0.1 percentage point increase in the annual rate of real wage growth is equivalent to a 0.2 percentage point increase in the tax rate. If real wages had grown by roughly 1.0 percentage point faster over the last half-century, and were projected to continue to grow at that pace, it would eliminate most of the projected shortfall in the trust fund.

Dean Baker

Social Security is a Problem of Income Distribution, not Demographics

The rich almost completely control debate in this country. There is no better proof of this fact than the current debate over the future of Social Security…

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4 months ago · 70 likes · 9 comments · Dean Baker

If we were to choose to raise the cap and collect these unpaid taxes from higher-income individuals, then we would raise more than enough money to keep the program solvent basically forever, even without having to pass the legislation described above (my emphasis, note that the figures below may be a bit out of date):

In 2022, Social Security allocated $1.2 trillion in benefits to Americans. That same year, American gross national income (the total money earned by Americans and their businesses) was just under $26 trillion.

If all of that had been taxed at the standard 6.2%, instead of just $168,600 per earner, Social Security would have accrued $1.6 trillion, a $400 billion surplus. The excess funds could have been saved in the trust funds for deficit years, allocated as benefits, or returned to taxpayers. As eliminating the taxable maximum cap would put social security in a strong financial position despite the current 3:1 worker-to-recipient ratio, we can see how this simple change would secure America’s most coveted program for generations.

JoeWrote

The One Weird Trick To Save Social Security!

Last week conservative commentator and aspiring musician/novelist/screenwriter Ben Shapiro stated he doesn’t believe in retirement. Yup, you read that right…

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3 years ago · 30 likes · 25 comments · Joe Wrote

But what about those demographics? What about that worker-to-retiree ratio? Doesn’t that mean Social Security is still a “Ponzi scheme” after all? Well, no. As Paul Krugman notes, the best way to think about the way the program is set up is as a dedicated revenue program, which is nothing special in government, nor does it make Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” For example, if people drive less one year, and less money is collected via gas taxes as a result, and we decide to spend more on road construction than we take in at the same time, that does not mean that road construction is by definition a “Ponzi scheme.” The fact that people come into play is irrelevant—it’s all about the dollars and where they go.

In addition, the problem is self-correcting. People do not live forever. What the chart above shows is a temporary bump leveling off over a long time frame. The Baby Boomers will eventually die off4, and the ratio of workers to retirees will once again come back into a more sustainable balance. We should not let a temporary shortfall allow the usual ghouls to take away one of the meager benefits we still have in this country, one which older generations fought for.

The simplest way to think about government finances — and also, for most purposes, the right way to think about them — is to imagine everything going into or coming out of one big pot of money. Taxes put money in, while government programs take money out…Most revenue goes into a common pot, and most spending comes out of that pot. But some taxes are dedicated to specific programs, which therefore have their own sub-budgets.

A fairly familiar and, I hope, not too controversial example is the Highway Trust Fund. Federal taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel, plus some smaller vehicle-related taxes, are used to pay for spending on highways and mass transit. Why assign certain taxes to certain programs? Basically, it’s about politics. It’s easier to get voters to accept new taxes or tax increases if they’re explicitly connected to paying for something people want…

Which brings us to Social Security, which is supported by FICA — a tax levied on everyone’s wages. People like Musk seem to imagine that workers putting money into Social Security are like, say, small investors buying $Trump coins, whose naivete is the only thing allowing earlier investors to cash out.

But paying payroll taxes isn’t a voluntary individual decision; like paying gas taxes at the pump, it’s the law. And there’s no reason in principle why Social Security couldn’t be run indefinitely on a pay-as-you-go basis, with taxes on current workers paying for retirees’ benefits. In fact, that’s more or less how the system was run until the 1980s. By 1980, however, it was obvious that some adjustments would have to be made. Why? Because the baby boomers were getting older…

Paul Krugman

The Clean Little Secret of Social Security

Social Security is in the crosshairs of the Musk/Trump administration. First Musk came out with the claim that tens of millions of dead people are still receiving benefits. This claim has been thoroughly debunked, but still made its way into deputy president Trump’s big speech Tuesday. Then Musk began declaring that the 90-year-old program is a…

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2 years ago · 3881 likes · 481 comments · Paul Krugman

In short, the fact that Social Security is funded through a dedicated trust fund is an artificially imposed constraint that its enemies are using to trick us into thinking that the program is unsustainable and that this country can't afford a dignified retirement for all its citizens, even as billionaires get obscenely rich. The elites lie to us because they hate us and want us to suffer. The people who aren’t lying to us are not as well promoted by the media, but I’ve cited some of them here.

So, in conclusion, I hope I have given you the facts to counter the universal narrative that Social Security is “broke,” or that it’s “unsustainable,” or a “Ponzi scheme” or that it “won’t be there” when you retire. It may very well not be, but the reasons have nothing to do with demographics or fiscal necessity. Rather it will be because of extreme inequality and political choices that are entirely of our own making. It will be yet another victory for the wealthy and plutocrats in their never-ending class war, plunging millions more Americans into poverty and destitution.

The late journalist Kevin Drum summed up the choices we face back in 2011:

If, about ten years from now, we slowly increase payroll taxes by 1.5% of GDP5, Social Security will be able to pay out its current promised benefits for the rest of the century. Conversely, if we keep payroll taxes where they are today, benefits will have to be cut to 75% of their promised level by around 2040 or so. And if we do something in the middle, then taxes will go up, say, 1% of GDP and benefits will drop to about 92% of their promised level. But one way or another, at some level between 75% and 100% of what we’ve promised, Social Security benefits will always be there.

This is not a Ponzi scheme. It’s not unsustainable. The percentage of old people in America isn’t projected to grow forever. Lifespans will not increase to infinity. Taxes go in, benefits go out. It’s simple.

Now, Social Security is not a very generous program, so it’s possible that you won’t want to retire on its modest benefits. But short of some kind of financial apocalypse — in which case we’ve got way bigger things to worry about anyway — Social Security benefits will be there for everyone alive today. Why is it that so few people seem to get this?

Understanding Social Security in One Easy Lesson (Mother Jones)

If there’s one thing everybody knows, it’s that Republicans are better at managing the economy than the Democrats.

In poll after poll, the majority of voters will consistently tell you that they trust the Republicans more than the Democrats to manage the US economy, and it’s been that way for as long as I can remember. People vote for Republicans because they claim to be “fiscally responsible” and they think that Republicans will be better for the economy than Democrats.

The thing is, it’s simply not true. Not only is it not true, but it turns out to be the opposite of true. And not just by a little—but by a lot.

We’ve known this for some time. I can recall reading an opinion piece at least fifteen or twenty years ago already in Forbes Magazine—not exactly a bastion of left-wing thought—which went over a mountain of statistics pointing this out. That article has stuck with me ever since. And in the intervening years, the divergence has become even more stark.

They key things to take away are:

1. By every possible measure of macroeconomic performance—including those that affect the working class—the economy does better under Democrats than under Republicans.

2. It’s been that way for nearly a hundred years.

3. The difference is not small—it’s quite large. So large, in fact, that economists are at a loss to explain it.

4. No matter how you skew the statistics—time lags, factoring out things like recessions, oil shocks, or other unexpected events, etc.—the result still stands. There is no way to statistically massage it away.

5. This divergence is the same for Canada, but not for European countries.

6. Even Republicans and conservative think tanks acknowledge this is true—they just don’t talk about it.

So why does everyone think that Republicans are better for the economy?

The Evidence

While I couldn’t find the original Forbes article I read years ago, here is a more recent one (emphasis mine):

Trump said out loud the same thing that Hillary Clinton has asserted—and top academics and journalists have confirmed. The same thing I’ve been compiling cold, hard government data on since 1980: By crucial metrics like GDP, job creation, business investment and avoiding recessions, the economy does a lot better with Democrats in the White House than with Republicans. Just one eye-opening example: Nine of the last 10 recessions have been under Republicans…

It is simply a fact that since World War II, Democratic presidents have seen 24.4 million more jobs created on their watch—an average of 78.6% more jobs created per year of Democratic administrations—than have Republican presidents. Ditto real GDP growth, 44% higher under Democratic presidents. On the flip side, unemployment has been 18% higher under GOP presidents.

Trump Is Right About One Thing: 'The Economy Does Better Under The Democrats' (Forbes)

The author of the above article touts a Web site he created which lists the many statistics that confirm this divergence:

https://presidentialdata.org/

Speaking at the most recent Democratic convention, former president Bill Clinton laid down another astonishing statistic: “Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs. I swear I checked this three times. Even I couldn’t believe it. What’s the score? Democrats 50, Republicans one.”

You know that the media would like nothing more than to discredit this and call Clinton a liar. Even the slightest error would get this labelled as “mostly false” or even “pants on fire” by the ostensibly neutral fact checkers. Yet even they were unable to refute it:

Most GOP-devastating statistic in Bill Clinton's DNC speech confirmed by fact checker (Raw Story)

A Web site put up by Congressional Democrats lists several of the same points:

• Of the seven presidents with the highest annual economic growth rate, five are Democrats. Conversely, five of the seven presidents with the lowest economic growth rate are Republicans.

• Of the seven presidents with the highest annual rate of job creation, six are Democrats. On the flip side, six of the seven presidents with the lowest job creation are Republicans.

• Most recently, President Biden has overseen 5.7% real GDP growth, the highest annual economic growth rate since 1984, and the creation of 7.4 million jobs.

President Biden Continues the Trend of Strong Economic Growth and Job Creation Under Democratic Presidents (Joint Economic Committee)

In fact, during his first term, Trump was the first president since the Great Depression to preside over a net loss of American jobs. Yet, astoundingly, he was considered to be “better on the economy” and “more trusted” to manage it according to voter polls during the 2024 election. Now, in fairness, a lot of those losses were due to the pandemic. But that didn’t stop him from taking credit for other pandemic-related statistics (such as low border crossings), nor did it prevent Joe Biden from being blamed for other pandemic-related circumstances (such as high inflation).

The data are clear: Democrats are far better for the economy, and have been since at least the Second World War. On average, GDP has grown by 4.1 percent under Democrats and only 2.5 percent under Republicans. When it comes to jobs, since the Truman administration, Democrats have added more than twice the amount of jobs as Republicans (70.5 million jobs under Democrats compared to 29.1 million under Republicans). The stock market—which should be the ultimate arbiter for rich people—also goes up more under Democrats, too. The S&P 500 gained an average of 11.2 percent under Democrats and 6.9 percent under Republicans since 1945. Economic bad times tend to happen under Republicans: 10 of the last 11 recessions started under Republican administrations1. It’s notable that every unified Republican government (Presidency, House and Senate) has led to a financial crash:

Every “Unified Republican Government” Ever Has Led to a Financial Crash (The Reformed Broker)

But if you want even more hard economic facts, a detailed study was done by two highly respected Princeton economists, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson. The paper was published in the peer-reviewed journal The American Economic Review. According to their summary:

Here’s an article in Murdoch-owned The Wall Street Journal—again, not exactly a bastion of left-wing economics or pro-Democrat sentiment—describing the results of the study (my emphasis):

The U.S. economy has performed better since World War II when the president is a Democrat rather than a Republican, two prominent Princeton University economists conclude. The reasons, they say, involve more luck than successful policies.

Over the past 64 years and 16 presidential terms, the U.S. grew at an average rate of 4.35% when a Democrat was in the White House and at a 2.54% when a Republican was, a gap the economists call "astoundingly large."

A similar partisan growth gap is seen in Canada, but they found no statistically significant difference between economic growth records of left and right governments in the U.K., France or Germany.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-WB-42134 (paywalled)

Notice how they spin it by attributing it to “luck” rather than policy given their editorial slant2. But note that they—even they—do not deny these facts!

A somewhat less editorialized summary of the Princeton study was featured in the The New York Times. According to the story (my emphasis):

A president has only limited control over the economy. And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.

It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office.

The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as “startlingly large.”

Since 1933, the economy has grown at an annual average rate of 4.6 percent under Democratic presidents and 2.4 percent under Republicans, according to a Times analysis. In more concrete terms: The average income of Americans would be more than double its current level if the economy had somehow grown at the Democratic rate for all of the past nine decades. If anything, that period (which is based on data availability) is too kind to Republicans, because it excludes the portion of the Great Depression that happened on Herbert Hoover’s watch.

Why Are Republican Presidents So Bad for the Economy? (Internet Archive)

You can read the original academic paper by Blinder and Watson yourself:

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20140913

And here’s a report from the Economic Policy Institute which references the same study and makes a similar case:

Economic performance is stronger when Democrats hold the White House (EPI)

So the real mystery here is not which political party is better for the economy. It’s not in doubt. The evidence here is overwhelming: the economy does far, far better under Democrats than Republicans, and this is true as far back as we have reliable data. Rather, the real mysteries are:

1. Why does the economy do so much better under Democratic administrations? Even partisan academics have to admit that presidents only have limited control over the economy. According to conventional wisdom, the difference between which party controls the White House should not be this large. And yet it is.

2. Why does everyone believe the exact opposite?

Why is this the case?

While the original paper is mostly silent on the issue, the New York Times article speculates as to why this might be the case. For my part, I think their conclusions are basically on point.

It’s actually quite simple: Democratic administrations simply follow the conventional economic wisdom. This may seem surprising, given that conservatives tout themselves as the experts when it comes to the economy. But conventional centrist economics has known since the Great Depression that governments need to spend countercyclically in order to stimulate the economy during a downturn. That is, Democrats are more willing to use stimulus and spend money in a bad economy than are Republicans. In addition, redistributive and pro-labor policies favored by Democrats lead to a stronger economy since consumers have more money to spend. This means a better economy for everyone, even the rich, who own most of what that money gets spent on.

Meanwhile, for the last fifty years, Republicans have focused exclusively on tax cuts, deregulation, and spending cuts (except for the military) to manage the economy. While both parties have presided over large deficits, those under Democrats have been caused mainly by stimulating the economy in downturns, with fairly good results. Republican deficits, by contrast, have been caused primarily by drastically slashing tax rates for the wealthiest Americans and big corporations. Republican economic wisdom holds that tax cuts for rich people will cause them to spend and invest more, stimulating the economy and sparking economic growth. But a recent paper by the prestigious London School of Economics determined that “trickle-down” economics simply does not work:

The new paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King's College London, examines 18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015. The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn't, and then examined their economic outcomes.

Per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn't, the study found.

But the analysis discovered one major change: The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality, the research indicates.

50 years of tax cuts for the rich failed to trickle down, economics study says (CBS News)

This may explain why there isn’t such a massive divergence between Conservative and Liberal (Labor) parties in Western Europe and elsewhere. Most political parties overseas are closer to the political center—and to conventional economic wisdom—than the Republicans in the United States, who are more likely to base their policies on the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Ludvig von Mises or Ayn Rand than on John Maynard Keynes. Right-wing parties in the Americas tend to subscribe to a radical form of extreme libertarianism far outside mainstream economic thought as the photo above illustrates. Can anyone imagine the Prime Minister of the UK or the Chancellor of Germany posing for such a photo?

There is no parallel for this in Europe where politicians are far more moderate and the wealthy have much less influence over politics and culture than they have here in the United States. Republican leaders in the US have bought into the idea that we need to “balance the budget” and run government “like a business,” except that doesn’t work—the government is not like a business and the national debt is nothing like personal household debt.

In an excellent post, economist Blair Fix takes a look at partisan politics and the rise of extreme plutocracy in the United States. As with the studies above, he marshals a tremendous amount of data and statistics to back up his conclusions. He finds that Republican control of legislatures at every level of government—federal, state and local—is associated with increasing plutocracy and falling fortunes for the lower and middle classes:

On this partisan front, the historical backdrop is that for forty years, Republicans have been playing a political shell game. As Jay Michaelson puts it, Republicans “appear populist … but act plutocrat”. What’s disorienting is that this shell game has worked. Although Republicans have historically governed for the benefit of the rich, they have recently rebranded themselves (successfully, it seems) as the party of the working class.

Partisan Politics and the Road to Plutocracy (Economics from the Top Down)

So not only is economic performance worse under Republicans, but the economy becomes much more unequal, too. So why do so many average-income people continue to vote for them? Despite all of the evidence, polls consistently show voters trust the Republicans more than the Democrats when it comes to economic issues. Why is that?

As Fix notes in his post, while Democratic control of legislatures weakens the drift toward plutocracy, it does not reverse it. This is important, and a key part of the problem with Democratic messaging and policies. We should—and must—do better.

Why don’t more people know this?

In a fascinating post, historian Heather Cox Richardson attributes the false belief that Republicans are better for the economy all the way back to the nineteenth century and the aftermath of the Civil War. The whole post is definitely worth a read:

Part of Americans’ sour mood about the economy stems from the poor coverage all the good economic news has received. Part of it is that rising prices are more immediately obvious than the wage gains that have outpaced them. But a large part of it is the historic habit of thinking that Republicans manage the economy better than Democrats do.

That myth began immediately after the Civil War when Democrats demanded the government renege on the generous terms under which it had floated bonds during the war. When the Treasury put those bonds on the market, they were a risky proposition, but with the United States secure after the war, calculations changed, and Democrats charged that investors had gotten too good a deal…

But I find this hard to swallow. People still believe this myth because of events all the way back in the late 1800s? Really??? And surely the Great Depression under a Republican administration and the recovery under a Democratic one should have put that myth to rest, permanently.

I think a more plausible explanation might have to do with more recent history. The Carter administration presided over the stagflation of the late 1970s, and the subsequent economic recovery happened under Ronald Reagan. Since that time, Republicans have portrayed themselves as economic wizards due to their supposed “hard-nosed” business acumen. The “Morning in America” boom in the early 1980s was seen as validating Republicans’ libertarian, low-tax approach to economics. At the same time, the economics profession, under the influence of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, was entirely captured by free market fundamentalism, displacing all earlier economic thought, giving Republican economic ideas the imprimatur of authority.

There are a couple of things to note here. One is that the economic conditions of the 1970s were caused by a massive spike in the price of oil, which was out of the president’s control. The end of Bretton Woods—under a Republican president—played a role as well. And the price of oil fell under Reagan due to the opening of Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay and the UK’s North Sea oil fields and subsequent decline in the pricing power of the OPEC cartel.

And when you compare the economic performance of the Keynesian era—the 1950s through 1980—to the subsequent Neoliberal era from 1980 through 2008—you will find that economic growth was actually higher under Keynesianism than under Neoliberalism. Nonetheless, Neoliberalism portrayed itself as the only “scientific” approach to economics, even as the evidence of poor performance and skyrocketing inequality mounted. The memory of the 1970s lingered on to the present day.

But I think the real reason might be even more basic.

Business people and the wealthy tend to vote Republican, and since the average Joe thinks business leaders know that they’re doing, they assume that voting for a Republican is somehow “pro-business.” The little guy—who knows next to nothing about business, politics or economics—sees business people as economically hyper-competent, so he trusts them to run the nation’s economy despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. “The bosses vote for Republicans, so they must be good for business,” is the extent of his thinking.

But there’s a difference between being pro-business and being pro-market. Business people in the US are uniquely willing to trade a less functional economy for greater personal gain. This causes greater inequality—which is bad for business—but they don’t care. As long as they can grab for themselves an ever-larger share of a smaller pie, they will always prefer that to a rising tide lifting all boats.

The American wealth class has always despised workers and harbored antipathy toward the poor and will gladly sacrifice enhanced economic growth and prosperity to punish them, even at a loss to themselves. By contrast, the upper classes in Europe do not have the same level of antipathy, so they have no inherent problem with redistribution or government spending, and they invest more in their human capital. Being pro-business in the US simply means being for plutocracy and looting rather than for broad-based economic growth.

Part of it is also due to anti-communist hysteria, I think. The Democrats are constantly portrayed as “communists,” in the right-wing media, and low information voters eat it up. Even if that were true, then the evidence clearly shows that Communists are apparently better at running the capitalist economic machine than the Republicans based on the data.

In other words, it’s all just marketing. Republicans bill themselves as “pro business” and “fiscally responsible,” just like banks are for “prudent lending,” oil companies are for “environmental stewardship,” fast food companies are for “healthy lifestyles,” and “your call is very important to us.” It’s all just marketing. As Fix finds in his post above, voting for Republicans is highly correlated with a very restrictive media diet consisting almost exclusively of Fox News and Facebook (i.e. the “Foxbook diet”).

Finally, the fact that the vast majority of people in the US believe the exact opposite of what is objectively true based on cold, hard facts is a microcosm for pretty much everything wrong with American political discourse these days. And seemingly no amount of facts will change anyone’s mind. As always, the mind control ray will continue to determine reality in the twenty-first century United States, and not facts or data.

So, no, Republicans are not better for the economy. And they never have been. The next time someone tells you that, they are simply mistaken, or perhaps delusional. And I expect the coming upcoming economic debacle we’re about to experience will make this performance gap even more stark.