Donald Trump is a socialist.
When I write “socialist,” I do not use the word the way most right-leaning commentators use it, meaning: “bad.” If you want to get a feel for exactly how insipid and repetitious the contemporary online right is, do a search for “cackling socialist”—you don’t even need to include “Kamala Harris.” You’ll be hip-deep in stupid in two clicks.
The thing about socialism is, it stays socialism—whether you like socialism or dislike it. It is a word that means something, and what it means isn’t every dumb thing you don’t like up to and including publicly funded sex-change operations for currently incarcerated illegal-immigrant felons.
Socialism doesn’t mean high taxes or an expensive welfare state. You don’t need socialism to have a portfolio of social-welfare programs. Japan has an extensive social-welfare apparatus, and it is far from socialist. Singapore is super-capitalist, and it offers my favorite kind of welfare: direct money payments to poor people. Even the big-spending Scandinavians have long abandoned the experiments in socialism that wrecked their economies in the postwar decades: In the high-tax European countries that so many of our progressive friends profess to admire, the trend for a generation has been away from state enterprise and central planning and toward privatization, trade, and investment. American progressives say they envy European health care systems they generally know nothing about; their European counterparts sincerely envy an American entrepreneurial ecosystem that they understand all too well but remain unable to replicate. It’s a funny old world.
Socialism does not mean government-funded education and retirement benefits and health care subsidies—those things are simply welfare, and there are better and worse ways to go about doing such things. Socialism means a centrally planned economy, one that is dominated by state action irrespective of whether it is dominated by formal state enterprises. Food stamps are welfare—socialism can mean state-owned farms and grocery stores, but more often it means a state apparatus that runs the farms and grocery stores as though it owned them, setting prices, negotiating the terms of employment, and determining how business is to be done—a little more of this crop, a little less of that commodity, etc.
V.I. Lenin described his ideal society as one managed as though it were “one big factory.” The Leninist view, it is worth keeping in mind, was profoundly influenced by some of the big ideas and most influential and prestigious thinkers of late 19th-century and early 20th-century capitalism, especially the mania for “scientific management” associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Karl Marx was right about one thing: The means of production really do shape the intellectual landscape in profound ways, and the advent of standardized, interchangeable, mass-produced industrial parts made by power machinery—machines making other machines, an innovation that owes much to Samuel Colt—suggested a parallel vision of social organization: rational, standardized, uniform, efficient, subject to constant refinement and improvement under the benevolent gaze of engineers and scientists and professional managers. We Americans still talk about society that way, e.g., as though the job of schools were not to educate human beings but to “produce workers” or, better still, “produce workers custom-trained for employers’ needs.”
The push toward cartels and monopolies in the age of the so-called robber barons was not exclusively rooted in self-interest—there also was a sincere belief that this was the way to make production more efficient, by eliminating wasteful duplication of work and products, “destructive competition,” and “overproduction,” sentiments that one can still hear today when Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump complain that American children have too many toys and school supplies or too many choices of deodorant. (I have been to Sanders and Trump campaign events, and I can attest that the splendiferous overproduction of deodorant is not a pressing American problem.) Lenin did not dream up the idea of society as “one big factory” on his own—American capitalists got there before him, swerving, as they still do, far outside of their lanes.
Donald Trump does not know the first thing about how a factory operates, of course, and neither do most of the private-equity dorks and middling media figures with which he has stocked his administration, a veritable museum of minor Fox News figures. But he has been inside Macy’s, and even had a product-licensing deal with the department store once upon a time—ghastly shirts and ties with a predictable Gordon Gekko meets Liberace aesthetic.
And so Trump’s version of quasi-monarchical Leninism is no surprise. It’s not one big factory: It’s one big Macy’s, with him leading the parade.
We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it. They don’t have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries. … What I’m doing is I will, at a certain point in the not too distant future, I will set a fair price of tariffs for different countries. These are countries—some of them have made hundreds of billions of dollars, and some of them have made just a lot of money. Very few of them have made nothing because the United States was being ripped off by every, almost every country in the world, in the entire world. So I will set a price, and when I set the price, and I will set it fairly according to the statistics, and according to everything else.
…
I am this giant store. It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.
President Trump’s vision of the U.S. economy in a global context, then, is that of a giant department store … run by a guy who doesn’t know how a department store works.
If you ask the president what the U.S. balance of trade with Eritrea should be (and if you then explain to him that, unlike “Nambia,” Eritrea is a country), he’ll give you a dumb answer, of course. But the problem won’t be that the answer goes off in one direction or another but that he—and people like him—think there is an answer, and that it is the job of the president of the executive branch of the federal government to provide one and act on it—that the president can somehow determine this “according to the statistics and according to everything else.”
It’s the “according to everything else” that gets you, of course. Never mind a big department store—take a simple grocery store, which typically has something like 40,000 to 50,000 unique products. If you want to determine what the “correct” price of each product should be, even within a fairly narrow range, and how much product “should” be stocked relative to current inventory, again within a fairly narrow range, throw in a few other important variables, and then consider all of the possible permutations, you end up with a number of possible distributions expressed by a number that has about 200,000 digits. If you took one second to consider each possibility—because you, a responsible central planner, are considering every option!—it would take more time to run the numbers for a single suburban grocery store than has passed since the Big Bang: All the time in the world, literally, wouldn’t be enough.
Trump can’t put names to faces for half of the people who work directly for him and invents imaginary countries from time to time. But, somehow, he knows what imported bananas from country X absolutely should cost relative to those from country Y—because neither a sparrow nor a drop of rain in Ecuador falls without his knowledge.
Donald Trump’s vision of the economy is classic socialism. And if you want to say that what it really is is classic nationalism, fair enough: As Jonah Goldberg observes, at the level of practical economics nationalism and socialism are the same thing: nationalized industries are socialized industries, socialized industries are nationalized industries, nationalized medicine is socialized medicine, etc. Bernie Sanders thinks and speaks as a nationalist, as do left-wing writers at places such as Dissent magazine—see J.W. Mason’s “A Cautious Case for Economic Nationalism.” Barack Obama’s economic views were explicitly nationalist. Trump’s view of a man at a desk moving pieces of the economy around like rooks and pawns on a chessboard is what socialism is all about—though the old tyrants in Moscow at least had the humility to assume that a committee of experts would be necessary to manage the economy according to “scientific” principles or at least the guile to pretend that they believed it, whereas Trump apparently has swallowed his own silly god-man horsepucky, being, as he is, an ass of exceptional asininity.
It’s as though somebody rewrote The Road to Serfdom as a third-tier Monty Python skit:
“These policies are going to make it more expensive to buy Christmas presents for my kids.”
“Well, maybe your kids don’t need so many presents.”
“But wasn’t your plan supposed to make us all rich?”
“It will. Think of all the money you’ll save when you can’t afford to buy ANYTHING!”
The same people who used to laugh at the Russians and their five-year plans for wheat production now prostrate themselves before the Committee of One, confident in the knowledge that Comrade Trump knows where the Hallmark Channel should be filming its next Christmas-themed rom-com and what percentage of the subcomponents for the flux capacitors should be manufactured in Canada. But, no, we didn’t elect the cackling socialist. Trump, to my knowledge, doesn’t cackle. But he is economically more in Lenin’s camp than in Adam Smith’s and Milton Friedman’s and Ronald Reagan’s. He already imagines himself as a kind of royal figure—any guess who the serfs are going to be when we get to the end of this road?
