Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.
For the most ardent—and online—defenders of Donald Trump on the intellectual new right, “Make America Great Again” has been displaced as the organizing ideological slogan by, “Do you know what time it is?” The point of this juvenile rhetorical question is that the postliberal elite who support and staff the Trump administration have an almost gnostic insight invisible to the rest of us. In their invincible faith in what often seems like an unpatriotic love of political power, they insist that the old rules—of American global leadership, free markets, limited government, fidelity to the Constitution—have passed their sell-by date. What is required is “new thinking” and “fresh ideas.”
What are these new and fresh ideas? For some, they are literally monarchism or autocracy. For others, they are mercantilism and a division of the world into “spheres of influence.” In short, their foreign policy was ancient when Charlemagne was on the throne, and their economic philosophy was hatched in the 15th century.
In service of these ideas, Donald Trump has literally made America—and Americans—poorer, bringing the United States to the brink of a recession in recent weeks by threatening to unilaterally impose one of the most regressive tax hikes in U.S. history. He’s momentarily been talked into standing down, but an economic environment in which the whims of one famously mercurial man can upend the international trade system and wipe out trillions of dollars in stock market value is not one conducive to sustained growth. For the next 90 days—and really, for the remainder of Trump’s term—decision-makers at businesses across the country and the world will be forced to speculate: Are the president’s tariffs merely a negotiating tool, or an effort to fundamentally remake the global economy? Even key White House officials seem not to know.
But the financial volatility of recent days is just one symptom of a broader, more deliberate descent. Decline doesn’t solely mean impoverishment; it means degeneration, to sink backward and down. And that is what the United States’ current leadership class is choosing for this country by willfully dismantling the free-market system, abandoning America’s role as a global leader, and degrading the separation of powers and rule of law. Even worse, it is doing so based on a suite of false assumptions: that Americans are weak, unable to compete in an open market, and incapable of responding to any incentives or exhortations more high-minded than rank self-interest or partisan contempt. The underlying assumption, held by leaders across the political spectrum, is that appealing to America’s loftiest ideals for reasons unrelated to partisan advantage is for suckers.
We reject that premise. Those American ideals, inherited from the Founders and fortified by later generations, are what brought the United States to the heights from which it is now slouching.
