Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: The Twilight of Neoliberalism Page 4 of 16

Is Trump Going To Purge Democrats, Seize Power and Rewrite the Constitution?

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On October 12, 2025

19 Comments

What can I say, it’s just the perfect Trump picture.

It’s for sure that there are those with great influence on him who want him to. Thomas Neuburger has the quotes, starting with Stephen Miller:

[This is] Legal insurrection. The President is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, not an Oregon judge. Portland and Oregon law enforcement, at the direction of local leaders, have refused to aid ICE officers facing relentless terrorist assault and threats to life. (There are more local law enforcement officers in Oregon than there are guns and badges in the FBI nationwide). This is an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers, and the deployment of troops is an absolute necessity to defend our personnel, our laws, our government, public order and the Republic itself.

“Legal insurrection … an organized terrorist attack on the federal government”. There are laws against that. Another example, Miller to Hannity:

The Democrat party … is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat party is not a political party. It is a domestic, extremist organization.

Noem and Hegseth agree (see here and here) and seem to be willing, as commanders of government forces, to fight by his side. Trump also agrees:

[T]hey’re throwing bricks at full force into the window and into the car. It looks like it’s a war zone. And I said, never let that happen again. From now on if that ever happens, and I say it here, you get out of that car and you can do whatever the hell you want to do …

Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room [the Pentagon’s generals] because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.

So, Thomas thinks this might be the start of a new civil war, or at least that’s what Miller wants and Trump may agree. (I think Trump is too fickle to be sure. But by all accounts Miller is the consummate Trump-whisperer.)

But what I see happening is something else. Just declare the Democratic party a terrorist organization and add in RICO penalties. Send law enforcement after them. Some may not be willing to, but ICE will do the job if no one else does, and other cops or military won’t fire on them, they’ll get the pols. Then put them in an ICE controlled prison. If really smart, set up an administrative court with executive appointed judges to try them, and either have the Supremes ratify it, or if that’s too far even for them (unlikely, but possible), ignore them.

Then, with full control of all legislatures, call a Constitutional referendum and change any and all amendments and the Constitution as Trump (or the smart lads who really do the work, like the 2025 crowd) desire, essentially changing America’s form of government permanently.

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Trump’s not smart enough for this, but Miller and various backers are, he’s got a Cabinet full of yes-men and women to back him, he’s purging the military and the three letter agencies of those who might try to stop him, and there’s no particular reason to think it might not work. There’d have to be a massive uprising, or enough soldiers and various types of police who resist to stop him.

If there are, it’s civil war. If there aren’t, well, it may be a low grade civil war anyway, or he may just get it thru. Hard to see most Democrats actually fighting back effectively, or fighting back at all.

Not saying this will happen. I don’t think they have the guts for it, and Trump is fickle. But there’s a large faction with a lot of influence who want it to happen, and they’re working hard to make it happen.

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China Is Going To Leave The US What America Left Britain: Nothing

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On October 10, 2025

27 Comments

It’s our annual fundraiser. We’ve raised a little over $6,420 from 54 people in the last eleven days, out of our goal of $12,500. If you’re a regular reader and can afford to support our writing, please subscribe or donate. Over 10,000 people read every day, but without those who give the site would not survive.

Chinese and American flags

So, China has slapped draconian export controls not just on rare earths, but on all technology related to rare earths. If you want rare earths you have to beg for permission and certify it won’t be used for anything military or anything technologically related. If you want the rare earths or tech to catch up, you can’t have them. (Like when the US banned advanced lithography machines.)

As an extra fillip, China has also announced that all American ships must pay port fees. (This is symbolic, few ships are flagged American.)

The writing was on the wall for this when China, just recently, told all domestic firms to not buy Western chips. That mean that they had enough of the chip technology stack that they felt they were immune to counter-sanctions.

And now the whoop-ass.

You can thank Trump for this. His chip and Huawei sanctions taught the Chinese they had to control their entire own tech stack. Before that they preferred American, Korean and Taiwanese chips. No big Chinese company would buy Chinese crap chips. If the US hadn’t decided on its moronic trade war, China would have allowed it to gracefully age out of its Empire, letting it keep some areas of technological superiority.

As usual, the Chinese played this ice cold. They took their lumps, they devalued the yuan, they made concessions. When Biden came in, he doubled down so they realized it wasn’t just a democratic hiccup, but core policy agreed to by both parties. Then Trump came in and went on his insane tariff blitz. Worked against his vassals, but China doesn’t have to take America’s crap any more and it isn’t.

Now, as the kids like to say, having fucked around, America and the West are about to “find out.” Revenge served ice fucking cold.

I want to be really clear on a couple things here.

First, China is not going to leave the US or the West anything meaningful in terms of tech lead. They are going to take the tech lead, with the industry to back it up, in essentially everything (they’re already in the lead in at least 80% of areas, so don’t kid yourself about the rest.) And they are going to break the US’s hold on the Americas too. By the time China is done with America, they’ll be lucky to still have have Mexico and Canada as vassals (which is why they might invade and is why the US is threatening Venezuela before it gets a full suite of Chinese and Russian weapons.)

Second: if you are in charge of any country in the world that is an American vassal and you have an IQ above 90 and the smallest amount of interest in the future of your country, your job right now is to transfer your allegiance to China and get the best deal you can in exchange. The longer you wait, the worse the deal will be.

I do mean everyone: Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea.

Everyone.

Get out, now. The US has already lost the war, and while there may be a lot of screaming and even a shooting war (without rare earths, the US needs to fight a war in the next two years, or wait tent years as it rebuilds its military stack) it’s over. Just like Japan had already lost even before Pearl Harbor (and that sort of attack is the danger now.)

China is going to run the world for the next forty to sixty years, minimum, barring ecological collapse. It has zero love for the old hegemons. The US, the Anglo countries and the Euros will not be treated kindly out of some feeling of kinship or because they are needed, neither is true. Only Australia and Canada have something to offer the Chinese might want. Everyone else is just wasting assets.

Besides, the Americans are bastards. Right now they aren’t offering anything but “stay our vassal and let us loot you.” Pull out your knife and your pen. Sign an agreement with the Chinese, and drive a knife right between America’s shoulder blades.

I’d say “they do it to you” but they’re natural born bullies and you’re already on your knees begging them not to hurt you more. (EU, I am especially looking at you. To say you have the dignity of slaves would be to malign slaves, who at least have no choice.)

America’s done. All statesmanship for the next fifteen years will be about handling the fallout. If the West had any statesmen, even one, that might be good news.

Chinese Companies Compete For Market Share & That’s Why Starbucks Is Toast

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On September 27, 2025

14 Comments

Starbucks sells expensive sugared drinks, and some of them have coffee in them. It’s been very profitable and despite some declines, remains so. The CEO was paid about $96 million last year. He was brought in to “turn Starbucks around”, and his main moves have been towards returning Starbucks to its roots as a “third place”, which is to say, somewhere other than work or home where people spend time.

That’s a good idea, actually, because if all Starbucks sells is expensive drinks, which most people pick up, then it’s a lousy value proposition for consumers, especially for the mass of consumers who are seeing a lot of inflation and effectively decreasing wages. The average drink at Starbucks probably comes in around $5 and it’s easy to spend $7, and that’s just on the drink.

Now here’s the issue: American companies are most interested in profits. They want to make large net profits and pay their executives well, which they do by giving them stock options and in most cases juicing share prices by spending massive amounts on stock buybacks.

 

 

American companies are in the business of making whoever controls them rich. Sometimes they’re willing to make a long play and compete for market share, but generally ONLY if they think there’s a possibility of achieving a monopoly or oligopoly position. So there was tons of money for Uber & Lyft, because investors knew that in the end, they’d be able to reap monopoly profits, which they now are.

But in markets where there doesn’t seem to be that possibility, corporations are much less willing to compete aggressively for market share by beating the competitor on price. They prefer to compete in other ways: the third place, for example, or a product that is perceived as better and effectively “price clump”. If an upstart tries to break into an established industry they may briefly drop prices to keep them out, but that’s as far as they’ll go.

Now here’s the problem, Chinese companies compete aggressively for market share based on price. Starbucks used to be the player in the Chinese coffee house market. Then they had their coffee drunk by an upstart named Luckin. Luckin is opening about 10x as many stores as Starbucks. It has 16,000 stores to Starbucks 7,000, and its drinks, which include fancy ones, are about 30% cheaper. Starbucks definitely makes more per store, but Luckin makes more gross. There’s no “third place” about Luckin, they’re kiosks, you order your drink, usually thru your phone (which offers constant discounts) and pick it up.

Because they have massive scale, their unit costs are low, and they benefit from the usual “no one can beat the Chinese at scale” advantage. (Though Starbucks could have done the same, they just wanted to be a more luxury brand and get the extra profits.)

Gadallion goes into this in detail, if you want the nitty gritty, but this chart shows the speed of Luckin’s growth.

 

Now Luckin has come to America. The drinks are cheaper and Starbucks does a lot of pick up business. If you’re just going to pick up a drink, why not go to the cheaper alternative, assuming the drinks are about as good? And unlike China, American consumers are squeezed big time. (China’s 2nd and 3rd tier city consumers are doing well, Beijing and Shanghai consumers are currently under pressure from the housing bubble being smashed, but should recover in the next year or two.)

For now Starbucks has more stores worldwide than Luckin. But their unit costs are higher even now. If Luckin keeps expanding, and especially expanding in the US and S.E. Asia, Luckin’s unit costs are likely to keep decreasing.

It’s hard to see how this doesn’t end badly for Starbucks, unless they get Congress or Trump to intervene. There’s momentum with Starbucks: people are used to going there and keep doing so. But if there’s something cheaper, that’s about as good?

If they compete on price, they lose a lot of their profit margins and investors are already squealing about the minor drops they’ve recently experienced. If they don’t compete on price, Americans who are price sensitive and don’t need “the third place” move to them, and they lose massive amounts of volume. There’s certainly a niche and a fairly large one for “buy a drink and stay at the coffee shop to enjoy it”, and I suspect it’s pretty profitable, but it’s smaller than what Starbucks is right now, and what’s to stop Luckin, after it wins the price sensitive customers from opening “Luckin Luxury Cafes” or somesuch, offering actual premium drinks and comfy chairs and tables and laptop charging, and using their unit cost advantage to out compete the “third place” Starbucks?

This is a specific case of a general rule: Chinese companies want scale and compete on price. They’re like American businesses in the 50s and 60s. They offer value and they aren’t trying to maximize profits by maximizing prices, because they’re used to an economy which has actual price competition.

I used to spend a lot of time in Starbucks, because they had stores in book shops, and I’d buy a coffee and read books for a few hours every day. I’d still be interested in that sort of thing and I have some emotional fondness for Starbucks because of what are, for me, good memories.

But it’s hard to be sanguine about their future. The third place stuff is fine, but if they want to survive, they’d better start competing on price while they still have a size advantage.

Most US companies are in a far worse situation: they’re already smaller than their Chinese equivalents. They can’t compete on price, it’s not possible, because they don’t have scale economies and can’t get them. As China catches up in quality and in many industries surpasses, they’re toast unless protected from Chinese competition, usually by law, geography or trade barriers. Businesses which aren’t, however, are about to experience what other countries experiences when Coke and McDonalds, in the 80s and 90s, came to town, or manufacturers experienced in the 50s and 60s before the rise of Japan.

Developing countries, with lower costs, have an ironic advantage when it comes to survival of many businesses. But high profit, high cost countries like America and most European ones?

Toast.

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London & New York Are Toast

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On September 24, 2025

14 Comments

Stumbled across this recently: 

  • China aims to become custodian of foreign sovereign gold reserves to strengthen its standing in the global bullion market, according to people familiar with the matter.
  • The People’s Bank of China is using the Shanghai Gold Exchange to court central banks in friendly countries to buy bullion and store it within the country’s borders.
  • The move would enhance Beijing’s role in the global financial system, furthering its goal of establishing a world that’s less dependent on the dollar and Western centers.

Remember when the US stole Venezuela’s gold? Remember when the West “froze” Russia’s reserves, including gold?

Actions have consequences. Since most countries do more trade with China than with the US, let alone the laughable UK, and since China appears a lot less likely to steal one’s reserves, this rather makes sense.

China does almost half of its trade now in Yuan, and the the remaining is often in local currencies. (The Russians pay in rubles, for example.)

When  you add in the trade flows, and bear in mind this is 5 years old and today China has overtaken in more countries…

Well, why exactly would you use US dollars for trade, or use New York or London as your primary foreign banking center? You’d be a fool if you did so, if you’re outside of the West+allies (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan.)’

The US stock market is also VASTLY over-valued. There hasn’t been a proper market correction which was allowed to stick in generations. The idea that US public companies are worth more than China’s public companies is ludicrous. As the actual world economy is now centered on China, not America, this will become unsustainable, because the US dollar is going to copy what happened to the UK pound over the 20th century, and the US will no longer have currency seignorage: if other countries don’t want it, the US can’t just print it without massive and crippling inflation.

This means the eternal rising market created by Greenspan and treated as sacred by every President and Federal Reserve Chairman is in its last gasp. No matter how much they will wish to prop it up, they won’t be able to without crippling side-effects beyond what can be papered over by printing more money and giving it to rich people. (All of this before the fact the stock market is currently an AI circle jerk, with companies buying NVidia chips for AI and NVidia then investing in those companies. When AI turns out to be an ordinary tech, useful for some things but not revolutionary, BOOM.)

Meanwhile:

This is a big deal. This is what GE and Siemens sell. Now there are Japanese and Korean and Chinese suppliers, but this a key technology. And Iran can make it now. GE has the largest installed base, followed by Siemens (German), but why court sanctions risk and repair parts being cut off?

When the Ukraine war started, Siemens withdrew from Russia, and refused to maintain already sold turbines.

Woops.

Again, core tech that used to be controlled by the “North” is spreading across the world. Hell, the Houthis are making their own farm combines!

And it’s China where the future is happening, including the Jetsons future:


The US isn’t even on this technology, let alone moving to scale. Let me remind you of the rule of Industrial dominance:

When there is a dominant industrial power (Britain to 1860, America from 1920 to 1965) you have to be ahead in tech to compete, because the dominant power can always scale cheaper than you.

This is an industry where the US and Europe aren’t even on the playfield. Worse (or better), it’s the sort of industry that, in wartime, can easily be converted to military production.

We’ll end with one more chart:

It’s over. It’s all over. The West is sinking into industrial and technological second place and it’s a second place that is long way behind first place. Further, massive US research cuts and a monomaniacal obsession with one tech (so called “AI”) indicate that the US isn’t serious about catching up, but has accepted its decline, whatever the political rhetoric may be.

This leads to the end of the American Empire, to vassals pulling away, and to a massive and sustained loss of standard of living, just as it did in the UK. Combined with ecological issues, I expect the American experiences of decline to be faster and worse.

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If You Understand Only One Thing About Chinese Government

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On September 2, 2025

4 Comments

It should be that almost always they do what they promise, and they meet their goals. An American-Chinese silicon valley type spent some time in China recently (I don’t agree wit the whole article, but you should read it), and among the bits that stood out to me was this:

In the US, when politicians make campaign promises, I never actually expect them to follow through. But Chinese leaders do—for better and for worse. The 2025 plans to build 1,350 Shenzhen parks or reduce China’s energy dependence aren’t mere propaganda. (Neither, tragically, was the one-child policy.) Accountability is built into China’s bureaucratic system through KPIs, and you can see the results firsthand.

This echoes what Naomi Wu noted: that the Communist party attains their goals, and that many of them are the smartest most capable people she knows. (I think the one child policy wasn’t a mistake, as it happens, though it probably continued too long.)

This chart is of average rent as a percentage of income.

As a westerner this is mind boggling. My entire life rent prices have just increased and increased and increased. So have housing prices. One of my big criticisms of China for years was that they had overly-relied on housing bubbles to fund their growth and that it was causing significant discontent. Every young Chinese person mentioned it as a problem.

So then they just… went and fixed it? And yes, it’s been painful, and led to some softness in the economy, but when it’s done, the economy will be much stronger. (See, “China is Transitioning, and So far successfully“).

China faced a challenge during Trump’s first term: he slapped export controls on chips. They didn’t have a significant domestic industry. So they built one. They knew that if America had done this with one industry, they could do it with all, so they set a national goal to become self sufficient industrially: to be able to make everything they needed. As this was happening, they realized housing was too expensive, so they made that part of the solution, they rotated investment out of real estate into industry.

To a Westerner who has lived their entire adult life under neo-liberalism, this is mind-boggling. Wait, the government can “just do things?” And when it decides to do things, it succeeds? It isn’t just bullshit?

I mean do things other than de-regulate and say “well there isn’t anything we can really do, this is just how the world is.” Do things other than just make the rich even richer? Do things other than constantly de-funding science and engineering and the humanities? Do things other than making medicine fantastically expensive? Do something other than blowing another asset bubble?

I’m 57, and I remember the world before neoliberalism, but I remember it as a child. In my entire adult life I have not seen a Western government capable of doing what China does: set an important goal which benefits the population as a whole and crush it.

China is winning because China deserves to win, because it is better run. I’m not going to whitewash it: there are a lot of things I don’t like about how China is run. But bottom line, it’s run more for the benefit of ordinary citizens than most Western countries, and those countries which seem to be run for the benefit of the population as a whole are running on legacy systems: the entire EU it seems, is considering gutting their social welfare systems to spend more money on American weapons. For my entire life things have been getting slowly worse in France and Germany, and quickly worse in the UK. In China, on the other hand, life keeps getting better for the majority of the population.

Are you worried about Democracy? You should be. But one simple threat is this: China isn’t a democracy and its actions clearly benefit the majority of its people more than the actions of American or British or EU governments benefit their people.

Democracy isn’t just a something word you wave around. If it doesn’t produce better results, people will stop believing in it.

China’s winning because the CCP gets results and the results it chooses to get are, much more often than in the West, good for the majority of its people. That means it deserves to win, and we deserve to lose.

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Trump Is Running the Standard Purge and Control Playbook To Install Decline

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On August 27, 2025

30 Comments

Some years ago I wrote an article about how to run a real left wing government.

Seven Rules for running a real left-wing government

Of course, it was really a guide for how to change the ruling ideology of a society. Because, yes, elites, apparatchniks and what as might be called a deep state state exist. These aren’t all the same thing. There is plenty of private support for whatever the status quo is, especially at the highest levels, since whatever the ideology is, it put them in charge and benefited them. There are also a lot of mid level enforcers, bureaucrats (both private and public) and professionals who benefit from the status quo.

Anyway, two of the seven rules were specific to the problem of running a left wing government in a neoliberal world (it was 2016.) But here are the other five

  • Your First Act Must Be a Media Law
  • Take Control of the Banking Sector
  • Who Is Your Administrative Class?
  • Take Control of Distribution and Utilities
  • Reduce Your Vulnerability to the World Trade System

Control the Media: Now the wording isn’t always the best, but Trump has been on a constant attack against the media. He’s changed who is allowed to be part of the White House press pool and he’s made the media pay blackmail money. He’s now talking about removing NBC and ABC’s licenses. He may, he may not, but the threat makes them change.

Take Control of the Banking Sector: for the first time in its history, a Federal Reserve governor has been fired the President has always had this authority in theory (except over the Chair), but has never used it in practice. Ironically I once advised Obama to use this power to stop the Fed bailouts in 2009. Control over the banking sector is really control over the permission system: whoever is given money or the ability to create money can do things. Once you have your hands on the money-artery, nothing significant can happen without your permission.

Who is Your Administrative class: All systems have a class of people which run the bureaucracies. We have come to know ours as the PMC. Trump is replacing them, firing them in huge piles, and replacing them with right wing, often religious, fanatics. These are people who will give him his military parade (denied in his first term), who will extradite his enemies, who will break laws for him knowing that the Supreme Court (carefully packed during decades of preparation for this moment) will make what they do legal, and that in any case, the enforcer class is under Trump’s control.

Indeed, Trump has been purging the enforcer class and replacing them with people who would not have been considered qualified by the previous system. This is true of the military, the FBI and indeed of all the three letter agencies. Since ICE are his loyal brownshirts, needing no purging, they are being massively enlarged and given far greater powers.

Reduce vulnerability to the World Trade System: Let’s state this simply: the US had been losing the trade game badly for about fifteen years. China was coming on hard, Africa is lost, South America is almost lost, Russia is no longer complacent and America has lost the lead in over 80% of technologies. It can’t build ships, its planes fall out of the sky, most electronics are made elsewhere, it can’t even make magnets. It’s a joke.

So Trump is creating a two bloc system, there’s the US and its vassals (calling them allies amounts to lying) Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Korea. On the other side China, Russia, Iran, and their friends, which includes most of Africa and Asia and a good chunk of South America.

The US has slapped 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, and tariffs on almost everyone else. Why? Well, simply enough, the US can’t compete. If there is free trade, or anything approximating it, the US’s economy will be further cannibalized. Since they can’t sell overseas, except for chips, food and a few other goods, it’s time to stop competing. The US can’t win, so it’s not going to play.

The problem, of course, is that unless the US takes this time behind trade barriers to become competitive, it’ll just keep falling behind, and there’s only so much it can cannibalize its vassals. Given the massive slashing of research and universities, with no sign of a new system to replace them, it’s clear that the US has chosen semi-permanent decline.

Trump is Changing the US ruling ideology to Controlled un-development

It’s still about making the rich richer, but Trump’s choice is controlled decline. The US and the West will fall further and further behind, living conditions will get worse and worse, but the rich will become relatively richer in relation to everyone else in society. Think India in the post-war period. Fantastically wealthy elites, everyone else is a peon. Oh, there’s lots of ruin in countries, but this is the direction of the arrow and it only changes if a different ideology takes over.

Competition in the US between all groups will become far more savage, because there is no net. You get you hands on a position which commands resources or you become homeless or techno-peasant.

The vassals, who mostly have social welfare systems, will be forced to liquidate them, buy US military goods (which are useless against the US, given the software driven nature of them) and sell off all their public goods to continue the enrichment of elites. Any who try to avoid this fate will be coerced as necessary, first by their own internal elites.

This is the future in America and its allies. The only way to avoid it is to figure out how to defect.

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Trump Takes Share Of US Company Profits & Pentagon Guarantees Rare Earth Prices

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On August 25, 2025

9 Comments

The US government is to take a 15% cut of Nvidia and AMD chip sale profits to China. There are also discussion of taking a 10% stock share in Intel.

Meanwhile the Pentagon has taken a hundred million dollar stake in a rare earth miner, and guaranteed minimum prices.

As Albert Pinto notes, this isn’t neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is dying, if not dead, in the US, though the Euros are clinging to it. Everyone’s noticed that China’s hybrid model absolutely trounced the West, and, hey, it’s a chance to get even richer. Pinto thinks that Trump is trying to change the nature of the oligarchy:

8/ Winters’ model of oligarchy:

1 Warring: armed oligarchs defend property claims separately

2 Ruling: oligarchs institutionalise defence

3 Sultanistic: 1 oligarch monopolises armed wealth and defence

4 Civil: state defends property regime Trump: US from 4->3?

Now I don’t think America’s oligarchy going to go Sultanistic, in the sense of one ruling oligarch. The only way that happens is if Trump manages to turn the Presidency into a Trump family matter, and that seems unlikely. But a rotating sultantic Presidency until, perhaps, someone manages to make it permanent: that’s possible.

But the days of laissez-faire are clearly over. Now this isn’t entirely stupid, I’ve been calling for what Trump did for rare earths for twenty years. It’s the obvious thing to do. Likewise, ensuring stable domestic production of necessary resources is sane and necessary and if one has to pay a little bit more, so be it.

Owning shares in US companies isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The truth is that every fundamental innovation which made the internet and smart phones possible was government funded. Tesla doesn’t exist without a massive government loan back when it was nothing. But the government doesn’t share in the upside nearly as much as it should, because large corporations pay almost no taxes. The government takes the risks (Solyndra was given about the same amount of money as Tesla at the same time, and went bankrupt) but doesn’t share in the upside. Tesla just paid back the loan, but if the US had an equity share, it’d have made out very well.

Golden shares, a 10% ownership in large or important firms used to be quite common. It’s not a new policy, but it used to be associated with the left wing. What’s going on now is a right wing version of the same thing.

The President is the strong man who runs the government. Everything private companies do they do because he allows it, therefore government has a right to a share of the profits and to exercise control when it chooses to. The President picks winners and losers, determines the effect of court decisions, and so on.

It’s the logical extension of the tendency to Imperial Presidency. Every other power in society is weakened, the President is above all. An elected dictator, as it were. (Similar to parliamentary democracies in that sense, but very un-American and without the protections of Westminister government, where new parties are possible and governments can fall easily.)

Right now the scramble is to see which faction will control the Presidency after Trump. The best bet is probably the tech-bro faction, since Vance is Peter Thiel, the Palantir surveillance state magnate’s creature. (Though puppets have a tendency to cut their strings when they attain supreme power.)

All of this entails a vast misunderstanding of how the Chinese public/private system works, by the way. For one, China probably has the most competitive (free) markets in the world in those sectors which are private. For another, the system is not run to maximize profit, but to produce certain social and policy outcomes, including a good life for the majority of the population. China has both deliberately reduced housing and rent prices, crashing the housing market and costing owners a huge amount of money, and it has been deliberately reducing the number of billionaires.

These aren’t incidental matters, and just saying “well, we’ll move to a mixed model” misses what makes China’s economy work so well.

But no society run by a financial oligarchy is capable of understanding that “more profit” isn’t the way to win economically, so America will continue to learn the wrong lessons from China. As for Europe, they aren’t even learning the wrong lessons, they’re just doubling down on austerity and increasing military spending in a way which will make some Americans rich and hardly help them at all. Not even in the game.

More on all this later.

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Yeah, America’s Gone Fascist

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On August 25, 2025

27 Comments

I think we can put a peg in this. For years everyone’s being “we’re going fascist.”

It’s done. It’s over. The US has gone fascist.

  • Purges of the military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to install personal loyalists;
  • Troops in the capital, armed, with law enforcement rights, and a promise to do the same in other cities;
  • Vast personal corruption by the man at the top, including blackmailing companies into personal bribes;
  • Masked men who often don’t show badges or warrants roaming the lands, forcing people to prove their citizenship (and often ignoring proof) and seizing people and throwing them into unmarked vans;
  • Full executive immunity;
  • A supreme court which has or appears poised to legalize all of the above; and,
  • Threatening ABC and NBCs broadcast licenses.
  • Yada, yada (add your examples in comments)

There isn’t much point in dancing around this. Perhaps there’s a technical case that this isn’t fascism, but some other form of nasty right wing government ideology, but whatever it is, the constitution and the important pieces of the constitution and bill of rights are dead or dying, including habeas corpus, the principle that no one’s above the law, the idea that troops shouldn’t be used domestically, etc, etc.

This has been coming for a loooonnnnngggg time, and plenty of people have warned about it. The fascism experts from Harvard who fled the country, much as many sneered at them, weren’t wrong in their diagnosis. Remember, a lot of people who left it too late to flee Germany (or Pinochet’s Chile, or your choice of example) got a permanent plot of land, a long government paid for stay in a small room or in Argentina a helicopter trip ending with a spectacular fall

(Pinochet is notable for training dogs to rape the wives of his opponents. Hopefully Trump won’t sink quite that low.)

I would suggest that the UK is almost there, and so is Germany. The EU as a whole, with its growing habit of just making protest and unwelcome parties illegal is trending hard. (Or, if you’re lucky, they’ll just make you a non-person, making it illegal for any bank or credit company to do business with you, or anyone to give you money.)

I don’t expect to spend a lot of time on this, though I’ll keep covering it. It’s been coming for a long time, it’s not a surprise and in some ways it’s not news. But a lot of people with suffer as a result.

For those who say “but Kamala” I note only that to win she had to either:

  1. Not say that she wouldn’t have done anything different than Biden; or,
  2. Come out against genocide.

Apparently supporting genocide was a red line for her, and fascism in the US a secondary issue. Neoliberals will always choose fascism over anything remotely left wing, including the left wing value of opposing a new Holocaust.

This is where we are.

 

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