The Shitocracy Doctrine

Trump, Yeltsin, and degrowth

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We here keep talking about how Trump is America’s Yeltsin. And watching this tariff rollout reminded me of the self-induced shock therapy that was done under Yeltsin’s government in 1990s Russia. I have a few short thoughts I wanted to share.

If you take Trump at face value — and I don’t see why you wouldn’t — he wants to rewire global and domestic economies to bring manufacturing back and herald in some mixture of 19th-century and 1950s consumerist America: big factories, workshift whistles, smoke stacks, big Made-in-USA cars rolling off assembly lines, the ability to rapidly pump out aircraft carriers in case of war with China…

One thing that’s surprising about his unilateral action is that it’ll make everything a lot more expensive. I just got my old bike tuned up and fixed, and the guy at the shop told me he doesn’t know much, but in the industry, they expect bikes and parts to go up 25 percent. And looks like this is gonna be going on pretty much across the board, not just with bikes. So there’s going to be inflation and a reduction in spending that goes along with it. That will lead to businesses having to lay off workers, which will only drive the reduction in spending and consumption even more, potentially triggering a real crisis. That’s the thing about this country — everything runs on the consumption machine. Pause it, and things start to collapse. And Trump hadn’t been making things on the consumption side any better, even before the tariffs. His DOGE boys had been gutting government jobs left and right and killing grants for research and funding for the arts. Some estimates put the number of government jobs cut under Trump to just under 300,000 — although the second-order effects are probably much higher. And again, that’s before tariffs will make everything at least 20 percent more expensive… Trump likes to gamble. We’ll see how it all shakes out.

You can tell things might be headed in a bad direction with these tariffs when all the MAGA influencers suddenly started telling their followers that money is just a social construct and it’s no big deal to lose it…a small price to stop evil foreigners from enslaving your kids!

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So under the Trump Total Prosperity Plan, the people of the United States will get: inflation, increasing unemployment, a reduction in spending on social services, and a general attack on every part of the post-New Deal state — labor rights, environmental regulation, oversight of the financial sector…

Even if you take Trump’s long-term goal of bringing jobs back to America at face value and if you think that he might succeed down the line, what is he doing it for? So that the American people will be able to go back to the Robber Baron Age — working in a polluted factory making cheap t-shirts and drone parts, while getting minimum wage with no healthcare, no unions, no health or safety regulations, and losing limbs in the looms or getting sucked into a hotdog vat? Reshoring Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle! Sounds like a MAGA dream come true!

The tariff rollout reminds me of Yeltsin, though because the Trump camp seems to be using it as kind of a drunk kung fu master anti-globalist shock therapy. They’re moving quickly to stun the system…to push it past a point of no return before the vast array of various entrenched interests come in to challenge them. They’re trying to dismantle the free trade neoliberal world order that their parents and grandparents had built right out from under themselves, and they’re doing it in the most chaotic and secretive way possible: multiple people in advisory roles all with different plans and seemingly incoherent proposals, and no one knowing what’s really happening and holding conflicting ideas about why things are being done — all with a charismatic clowning guy at the top who himself barely in charge of the situation or even aware of what might come next, making decisions off the cuff, while impoverishing hundreds of millions and of course trying to make sure that the people closest to them are making a killing in the process.

It really does remind me of the way that Yeltsin and his reformers jockeyed to break up the Soviet Union, while keeping everyone in the dark about their intentions. If you want to get a sense of the chaos of the Soviet Union finally unravelling and Yeltsin putting Russia on a path to “free-markets” and “democracy,” I highly recommend reading the last few chapters of Collapse.

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And I want to say one more thing here: I’ve seen quite a few people who are critical of consumerist culture and our technological fetish gripe online about all the negativity that’s being heaped on Trump’s tariff plan by the left. They’re not ostensibly Trump supporters, but they think that the left needs to give Trump the benefit of the doubt because, well, at least he wants to end an economy based on outsourced labor and cheap goods, unlike the liberals. And they think that these leftists, in their rush to dunk on Trump online, are basically siding with neoliberal globalists, and the Kamala PMC set, and the IMF.

I’d love some degrowth myself. I’d love some restructuring of society to reduce consumption and production and promote a slower, more local way of life. But Trump is definitely not onboard with this kind of thinking. He does not support a new type of society that’s based on reducing consumption and production. It seems he wants to bring back at best the 1950s and at worst the 19th century: maximum fossil fuel consumption, factories, big naval armadas and drone armies, massive arms spending in preparation for a global war. He’s a globalist at heart. He wants to restore the American Empire to its former glory. But it’s true, if his tariff plan goes through, it will very likely lead to a kind of degrowth — the worst kind of degrowth possible…one that’ll push regular people into despair and poverty. It’s basically another flavor of neoliberal austerity — an austerity that he thinks will restructure society.

And the “let Trump do his thing” types think that’s a great development. They don’t make this argument outright, but I sense that at the core of their thinking is the idea that the suffering that’ll be pushed on people by Trump’s plan is a necessary means to an end — a step in our evolution towards a new society. Because the status quo is so bad and unsustainable anyway, they hope that Trump, through the destruction he’s causing, will put America on a path to the future they want — a future where anti-globalization and localism thrive and a new romantic anti-technological age will rise. They think that he’ll burn down the globalist order and, despite himself, will help usher in a better world. Yes, people will suffer, and they’ll get used to having less, but then they’ll work to build a new society on the heap of the old one…a new society with better values. That’s what they’re hoping. So they end up being unwitting Trump supporters. Reminds me of the Russian intelligentsia fully supporting Yeltsin, thinking he represents democracy and freedom, and later finding themselves on the brink of starvation, being unable to make ends meet with their professor and researcher salaries after universities were gutted out and inflation went through the roof.

If the Russian scenario — which, by the way, was also designed and pushed by American technocrats — is any template, I don’t think that’s how it will work out.

When an advanced society like the USA goes into deep crisis and collapse, and where poverty, joblessness, and instability go through the roof, it is very unlikely to create a culture that is open to experimentation or one willing to play aroud with new ways of living. What is more likely is that it will create a very mean and conservative society with a pliant population that will be willing to make any concessions in return for a semblance of order and stability. In short, Trump’s 19th-century austerity agenda isn’t going to turn Americans into hippy degrowthers and anti-consumerists. It’ll turn them angry and mean and very docile. They’ll do anything and back anyone who’ll deliver a return to normalcy. And then some much more efficient bureaucrat like Putin — or most likely much worse — can actually come to power and make Trump’s 19th-century Robber Baron autarky vision real.

—Yasha

PS: Though the funniest likely short-term outcome of all this is that the Democratic Party will surge in popularity because Trump tanked the economy, and they’ll be convinced that all their shitty policies that helped get Trump elected in the first place were 100 percent right all along. They’ll probably run Gavin Newsom as president and win. And then Newsom will adopt 50 to 75% of the political positions of Donald Trump, label it the Abundance Agenda, and think of themselves as saviors of western civilization.

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