Trump channeling the Yeltsin Mindset
We’ve been talking about how with Trump America has entered its own Yeltsin Age. I wrote a bit about the tariffs specifically a few days ago, but there’s one more thing that reminds me of the Yeltsin Mindset in relation to Trump Beautiful Tariffs Plan: His belief in the beautiful power of the freemarket.
It’s safe to say that almost no one loves globalism anymore here in the United States, and that lots of people — no matter if they are MAGA or Woke Libs or degrowth leftists — support bringing production back from abroad. And there are lots of ways of doing it without causing immediate price shocks and immiseration to people on the poorer end of the spectrum, if our ruling class was really serious about it. Trump, though, has been going about it in a very specific way so far: 1) he’s shocking the system, with what seems like a plan to make sure that it will be hard to go back to globalist normal…and 2) he’s putting all his faith in the power of unrestricted market forces, guided by nothing other than costs and prices and profits, to do the job of bringing America back some hybrid version of the 1950s and 1920s, when this country used to be a great industrial power with belching factories and trad values.
One thing that Trump and Trump’s people are definitely not talking about is subsidizing or providing government support for local producers, which would ease the price increases and the shock and the pain that’ll almost certainly hit people if his edicts stay true. At the same time, he’s waging a war on social programs and the regulatory and welfare state, another source of support for people. (Naturally this doesn’t if we’re talking about Our Beautiful Corporate Military, which is about to get its biggest budget allocation in history.) So for now, the beautiful market is it. Market “reforms” are the order of the day. He’s shock doctrine-ing himself into some kind of new neoliberal neomercantilism. A new age is upon us.
I’ve been looking through some material from the early Yeltsin years, inspired by my recent reread of Collapse by Vladislav Zubok. And I came across a speech that Boris Yeltsin gave on October 29, 1991, to the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Soviet Union in which he asked the Congress to vest him with dictatorial powers to end the Soviet Union and to rule by decree to liberalize the economy.
It was the first real hard announcement, if I am not mistaken, that Yeltsin was moving forward with shock therapy: going all-in on radical reforms, taking the IMF-backed approach rather than more gradualist ones that had been discussed in some quarters and which were supported by the majority of Russians. Fittingly, Yeltsin gave the speech announcing his intent to destroy the USSR while being looked on by a massive Lenin. His sales pitch worked. A majority of the deputies agreed with Yeltsin’s vision, and a few days after the speech they voted to give him the dictatorship he wanted.1
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The economic plan was based the thinking of Yegor Gaidar, one of the most diehard believers in the power of freemarkets and who ultimately rejected Chinese-style gradual economic reforms and helped align Yeltsin’s government with America’s neoliberal thinking.
Anyway, if you squint at it a bit and imagine words like “China,” “trade deficit,” “DEI,” “wokists,” and “we’re being robbed and cheated” placed strategically in the text, the speech that Yeltsin gave that day on the floor of the Congress of People’s Deputies kinda sounds like Trump and the tariffs and his general agenda: shock, reset, destroy the globalist world order, let the beautiful domestic freemarket work its magic…
Here is what Yeltsin said on that historic day: