America is a nation still at war with her mythologies. For all the electoral postmortems, in which a teeming desire for some kind of break from the economic status quo continued to ring out in the exit polls, there was a blank space. While it seems to have been missed by most of the pundits, I’ve regarded it as a serious omission: an enveloping misunderstanding among the electorate about what American capitalism actually is.
This is not the same old song and dance you might hear from some quarters: I don’t dismiss anxieties about personal solvency, the challenges faced by small businesses (I’m a small-business owner myself), or the future of our entitlement programs. Most of us are going to worry about money for the duration of our lives.
But a delusional mythology about American capitalism has taken hold—one that has seemingly instilled in We the People that we have an inalienable right to prosper; to be immune from the risks that are part of capitalism’s natural order. This is an imaginary right that’s been made to seem real by politicians who are afraid of educating their constituents on what our model of commerce actually is. Frankly, our national press has been mostly lazy on this, as well.
“Are you better off today than four years ago?” is an illogical question in a capitalist nation. Are some worse off today than four years ago? Sure, and I make no light of that. There are also millions better off; not only did President Joe Biden oversee the regaining of millions of jobs lost during the Covid pandemic, he led in the creation of millions more. But if there’s a lesson to be learned from the past few decades, which have pivoted from an economic crash to a fitful recovery to a pandemic to a more robust comeback—really, the envy of the rest of the world; an actual instance in which American exceptionalism actually holds true—it’s that life comes at you fast. There are some who will be doing worse off by the time they finish this article than when they commenced reading. That’s not flippancy, just reality.
Welcome to capitalism, whose proponents always cite unequal outcomes as a reason to extol it. But some things are easy. Eggs are expensive? Eat fewer of them. Cut down on egg whites. Let them eat yolks. Gas prices high? Insurance for your health, properties, and vehicles? Supply chain constraints harming your livelihood, or your quality of life? Remember when the price of gas steadily increased during former President George W. Bush’s second term? Gas was cheap in 2020 because, well, tens of millions of drivers weren’t, uh, driving. In fact, Trump threatened the Saudis, in the early days of the pandemic: Cut oil production, or lose our military support. Why? Because more oil would have made gas even more useless, and “useless” and “oil” aren’t the mellifluous chimes of cash registers ringing.
Meanwhile, we have endless debates about whether needs such as access to medical care, food, and affordable housing should be rights or should be left to the exigencies of good luck and near-perfect health. We’ve flattened what should be an invigorating debate, one that might be the crucible for good policy ideas, into the sorriest matchup of fake political identities: pinko communism versus rugged individualism. I promise you, there are vanishingly few pinko Communists or rugged individuals wandering around.
I’m all for good jeremiads about the costs of groceries. Your problems are real to you. But we live in a country where many of our fellow citizens don’t have the means to darken a grocery store door. Feeding the hungry, anyone? Nah, talk to us when we’re back from recess.
This shouldn’t be breaking news to anyone, but let’s remind ourselves: Presidents have very little control over inflation. You, however, have considerable power. You know what my wife and I did when household costs became too onerous last year? We decreased our expenses. This is what they used to call “fiscal conservatism”—tighten the belts, austerity, live below our means, mind our debt. If you’re reading from the Reagan hymnal, it’s right next to some other recognizable tunes: “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” is one. “Back in my day we walked to school in the snow without shoes,” is another. What would Gary Cooper do? Probably not whine about eggs.
I don’t mean to come off as insensitive. I understand how quickly one can succumb to this myth of entitlement. In 2015 and 2016, even though I was doing financially better than at any time in my life, President-elect Donald Trump’s populist campaign resonated with me. I knew people who lost jobs and contracts to overseas companies and workers. Years before he became a fixture in our politics, Trump would forewarn of the dangers of competition with Asian nations, in particular. On such occasions, when I heard him speak, I usually nodded in concurrence.
What I never thought at the time was: Do my fellow angered Americans realize that offshoring to increase profits for shareholders is a feature of modern capitalism, one advocated by both parties—but, in particular, the GOP’s chief capitalism mythologizers? The mythmaking here is both substantial and recent. As The New Republic contributor (and fellow disaffected Republican) Bruce Bartlett chronicled on these pages, for most of American history, the corporation was only “permitted to exist and enjoy benefits unavailable to other forms of business because they served some sort of public purpose.”
It was understood that these firms had broad constituencies to serve: customers, communities, employees, even other firms. But as Bartlett notes, this began to change in the 1970s with the rise of Milton Friedman and his vision of corporate responsibility, which held that shareholders were solely and wholly entitled to the profits and proceeds of corporate fortunes. It was only after this myth took hold that a corporation could dream of divorcing itself from all those other stakeholders and contemplate sending jobs overseas, chasing cheap wages and easy returns.
This is how we’ve lived for many years. We’ve essentially tolerated it, even as we’ve fitfully complained about all the negative externalities that come from these arrangements. But I want to pose this question: What do Trump voters—and, especially, those in the MAGA community, of which I was once a member—think capitalism is?
We legislate against some of the baser traits of our nature: incitement, theft, violence. Our laws aren’t entirely devoid of protections against avarice (think antitrust regulations), but Americans, collectively, have developed a high tolerance for greed.
There’s that capitalist meritocracy mythology at work. This quietly self-defeating ideology is championed by many who have been failed by both of our major parties, and those concerns have been particularly exploited and manipulated by Republicans who have traumatized them into believing that liberalism, and not capitalism, is the source of their ills; that liberalism is why they work and work but never even break even, much less get ahead.
Lest there be any confusion: I am a capitalist, because entrepreneurship and innovation best advance in free markets. I have to acknowledge that I believed many of these myths and felt that my own misaligned rage, which seems to be even more acutely experienced today by MAGA devotees, was justified; I see now that this was rooted in ignorance. Trump is not entirely incorrect when he speaks about outsourcing; of once-thriving communities that have been ravaged and hollowed out. But he’s persuaded millions into believing that only he can successfully stymie those same global and domestic capitalist forces that he rather conspicuously did nothing about in his first administration. And how convenient: It turns out that the people who need to be punished are foreigners abroad (through tariffs) and immigrants at home (through deportation)—his go-to bugaboos.
Of course, he spent most of his first term hyping the same villains. I have often wondered if those in the MAGA community ever ask why it didn’t yield a broader prosperity. And do they ponder why he didn’t try anything else? Because Trump understands, in his own pedestrian way, that capitalism often operates less on merit the higher one moves up in the hierarchy.
Trump likes to rage against the so-called “deep state.” Let me tell you: He is the most “deep state” capitalist in American history, given the millions his businesses earned in foreign payments. So much for thwarting the globalists, huh? Want an argument for why the uberwealthy should pay more in taxes? It’s not because we should “eat the rich” or claw back 90 percent of their wealth. Neither is palatable—even, probably, to those who wouldn’t mind seeing gazillionaires all take baths. Rather, it’s that if these money hoarders could have made their fortunes in any other country, they most certainly would reside in that respective country, and not the U.S. Are we to believe this doesn’t apply to Trump?
Broadly speaking, the two big ideas among the MAGA set are: (1) Liberalism is almost solely culpable for our national ills (though the RINOs, Republicans in Name Only, are up there), and (2) Trump is the greatest fixer God ever created. Most of those who voted for Trump—including, especially, MAGA supporters—want him, and by extension, the federal government, to heavy-handedly intervene in commerce. This despite the fact that the same crowd would call it communism, socialism, or Marxism if a Democrat suggested doing the same thing. Confusion is mutually shared between me and many Trump voters; it’s confounding when everything is mythological.
I cannot, to some extent, fault those looking for a hero like Trump. The 2008 financial crisis placed the ills of capitalism front and center. What’s more, it spawned an understandable skepticism in banks and government. And no small amount of justifiable rage, as well: Ordinary people watched their leaders bend over backward to indemnify scofflaw financial institutions while the dreams and livelihoods of those not lucky to work on Wall Street went up in smoke. But what made that episode particularly deleterious is the political decisions that came afterward. We are not suffering from too much regulation, but too little; the laissez-faire ethos that guided our faltering response to a very real systemic crisis is one of the pillars—perhaps the most central one—of American capitalism.
One reason we are in the mess we’re in today is that we suffered such an immense trauma during that period, a trauma that’s ongoing because of these two powerful notions that live in our heads: the capitalist myths in which we’ve been inculcated and the memory of the day those gods failed. Where has that trauma led us? To the idea that a singular person, Donald Trump, can be an economic savior—the messiah who alone can usher us into utopia. This belief is much more rooted in the weird, Soviet-era Communist Great Leader than in anything to do with capitalism.
Now that does not mean the government has no role in our economy; see the aforementioned growth the Biden administration fostered—successes born from analysis, expertise, and quite unradical tinkering with the economic levers. The fact is, however, Trump and the GOP didn’t actually campaign on any ideas to increase economic mobility and opportunity; they continued to just push a gauzy notion of a nostalgic time in our lives to which we can return once we’ve dispatched the “enemies within.”
Meanwhile, people are looking for reasons why they seemingly work more and more yet can’t seem to get ahead; I sympathize, very much, to this frustration because it resonates with me.
But the MAGA myths are not going to resolve this need. They’re going to load you up with trauma, desperation, panic, despair, hopelessness, and nihilism. I am trying to build a new community for those who leave MAGA; when many have their epiphany about the betrayal of Trump, we want them to find that exit ramp out of MAGA. I want to encourage people who’ve never strayed into the thickets of Trumpism to have some forbearance, and welcome them back.
We can start by recognizing that we all share this civic crisis in common: We’re not well versed in what economic model we’re actually living under—or how it’s changed over time. This is not a reflection of a dearth of intelligence; I’d argue it’s not even primarily a failure in education, although that’s part of it. More than anything, it’s representative of the fact that our leaders—at all levels of lawmaking power—are frightened to have candid conversations about capitalism, for fear of losing their donors, their positions, and being branded as Marxists. But the GOP’s shameless lying and the contradictions about what Trump is promising his followers and what he’s actually going to do is pushing us to the brink. We need leaders who are not afraid to deal in plain truths.
The inherent flaw in mythologies is that the debt they owe to reality eventually comes due. As in 2016, Trump has been bequeathed a relatively stable economy. Once he begins to destabilize it—most adversely affecting the lower and middle classes and small-business owners—the falsehoods will begin anew: The destabilization is actually Biden’s fault, someone else caused this problem. Democrats should spend less time trying to suck up to Elon Musk and more time preparing their responses to these lies, absurdities, outlandishness, and shamelessness. Because when this myth collapses, someone will need to be ready to lead us all back on the right path.