Monthly Muse: 7/2024

Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation

Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a quote or passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.

Here’s the July 2024 Monthly Muse.

Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth

• Weekly Grounding #54

• Weekly Grounding #55

• We Are All Trumpians Now

• Weekly Grounding #56

• Weekly Grounding #57

Contemplation

My article this month, “We Are All Trumpians Now,” appears to be the most controversial piece I have written for Handful of Earth so far. I noticed a significant spike in both canceled subscriptions and new subscriptions after it was published.

I found this polarized response surprising. The core of this piece is, in fact, about how a broad movement of the people (the anti-globalization movement) has come to influence the economic policies of Democrats and Republicans alike. “We Are All Trumpians Now” is not about giving Donald Trump or Joe Biden undue credit for the anti-globalist shift in economic policy; rather, it is an effort to demonstrate that ideology can “trickle up.”

This is not to say that anti-globalist Trumpism or Bidenomics somehow represents the late-1990s/early-2000s zeitgeist of the anti-globalization movement—far from it. We are in a new era with new political alignments. That said, the influence of the anti-globalization movement on the bipartisan post-neoliberal turn is, in my view, hard to deny.

“We Are All Trumpians Now” is also a reminder that we are not always as polarized as we think. The fact that both parties have been forced by the people to reject key elements of the neoliberal economic model is a cause for optimism.

There is still a long way to go, and the question of what industrial policy (and industrialism more broadly) is ultimately for must also be addressed going forward. But the fact that we no longer live in a political climate in which deindustrialization and financialization are unquestioned dogmas is an incredibly significant shift. To fail to recognize this transformation would be an insult to the legacy of the anti-globalization movement and a blow to the possibility of collectively building a future beyond neoliberalism.

Provocation

“It is at this point that the financial sector wields its political power to demand public bailouts in a vain attempt to save the financial system’s ability to keep on expanding at compound interest. Much as environmental polluters seek to shift the cleanup costs onto the public sector, so the financial sector demands cleanup of its debt pollution at taxpayer expense. The fact that this is now being done in the context of ostensibly democratic politics throws a leading assumption of political economy into doubt. If economies tend naturally to act in their self-interest, how did the financial sector gain such extractive power to raid and dismantle industry and shed its tax burden?

“How has planning become centralized in the hands of Wall Street and its global counterparts, not in the hands of government and industry as imagined almost universally a century ago? And why has Social Democratic, Labour and academic criticism become so silent in the face of this economic Counter-Enlightenment?

“The answer is, by deception and covert ideological manipulation via ‘junk economics.’ Financial lobbyists know what smart parasites know: The strategy is to take over the host’s brain, to make it believe that the free luncher is part of its own body. The FIRE sector is treated as part of the economy, not as draining the host’s nourishment. The host even goes so far as to protect the free rider, as in the 2008-09 bailouts of Wall Street and British banks at ‘taxpayer expense.’”

—Michael Hudson, “From Marx to Goldman Sachs: The Fictions of Fictitious Capital”