The Most Beautiful Word in the Dictionary
CrowdSource 4.7.2025
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: tariffs, Richard Nixon and deglobalization.
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Why Does Trump Love Tariffs?
The word “tariff” is the most beautiful in the dictionary, according to President Trump. Why is Trump obsessed with taxes on imports?
“We’re a Debtor Nation.” In 2019, the New York Times told the story of why Trump has fixated on tariffs since the Japanese economic boom of the 1980s.
“A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System.” A November 2024 paper by economist Stephen Miran argues that trade deficits and dollar overvaluation will eventually curb American power, and that this can be corrected through tariffs. Today, Miran is today a White House adviser.
Good Jobs. As
tells it, on-shoring manufacturing is also part of Trump’s national security strategy against China, as well as a bid to fight working class anomie, drug use and deaths of despair by providing stable employment for the part of the working class that voted for him.
“Nixon Shock”
People are comparing Trump’s tariffs with the Nixon Administration’s “controlled disintegration of the world economy” in the early 1970s through, among other things, ending the gold standard.
History Rhymes.
argues that both Nixon and Trump “aimed substantially to devalue the dollar, while also strengthening its status of being be the world’s reserve currency, [though] the means were different. …Trump … is trying to make his tariffs do for him what the [Nixon’s] Federal Reserve used interest rates for: as a weapon that inflicts more pain on European and Asian capitalists than it does on American ones.”Why devalue the dollar? To boost American exports.
“Echoes.” Larry Edelman notes Nixon’s short-term failure: “Nixon’s plan was initially greeted enthusiastically by investors as a bold move to right the economy. But after the shock wore off, inflation metastasized in the ‘stagflation’ that came to define the latter part of the decade.”
Pen Pals. In the 1980s, Trump and Nixon exchanged letters expressing mutual admiration.
Supporters, Critics, Arguments and a Conspiracy
Three tariff supporters:
Frame It Differently.
has rhetorical advice for Trump: tell voters what makes the tariffs reciprocal.Friendly Suggestions.
with a sympathetic critique: “[Trump’s policy] needs to be the start of a much larger program of reindustrialization, not a one-and-done action that effectively leaves the troops stranded on a narrow beachhead.”A Win for the Working Class. So argues “MAGA Lefty” Batya Ungar-Sargon.
Five critics:
Bad Math.
and Kevin Corinth say: “the formula the administration relied on has no foundation in either economic theory or trade law,” and their calculations are wrong, too. agrees: “The tariffs … were calculated in an absolutely idiotic manner.”Hidden Interests.
uncovers them: “If you follow the business media you might get the impression that there is no sector of American commerce … that’s not recoiling in horror at the tariff announcement. But that’s not the whole story.”Tariffs are Not Enough. Overcoming trade deficits also requires “taxing financial transactions, using central bank window guidance, and establishing a national development bank to direct investment into productive sectors and not to asset price inflation,” says John Ryan.
Three tariff-related arguments:
Tariffs and the Navy.
and Edward Luttwak disagree.Trump and Marx.
and have contrasting views.Did America Really De-Industrialize?
and Michael Strain with different takes.
One almost-conspiracy theory:
Right Wing Accelerationism.
theorizes: “Trump’s seemingly irrational policies … are not designed to succeed within the old paradigm, but to accelerate its failure.”
The Irony of History
Some writers are drawing parallels between Trump’s tariffs and the 1990s anti-globalization Left.
Hindsight is 2025.
with a critical appreciation of the anti-globalization Left: “Their basic point, laid out in manifesto form in No Logo, was that although cheap goods might seem like a good deal to American consumers, they were a bad deal for American workers, who now had to compete with workers, some of them children, being paid a pittance to work in brutal conditions. … The question of how the global economic system should be restructured was less discussed.”From No Logo.
in 1999: “… the excitement inspired by these manic renditions of globalization [are] wear[ing] thin, revealing the cracks and fissures beneath its high-gloss facade. … over the past four years, we in the West have been catching glimpses of another kind of global village, where the economic divide is widening and cultural choices arrowing.”Thom Yorke. The Radiohead singer is a case in point.
In 2000, inspired by No Logo, Yorke’s band famously toured in environmentally-friendly tents free of corporate logos.
In 2003, Yorke wrote: “This is a crossroads in the global economic system. Do we carry on preaching this free unfettered trade garbage or do we admit our mistakes and try to do the right thing for once?”
In 2021, looking back at the year 2000, Yorke observed: “anti-globalization was something that was the property of the Left rather than the Right at the time … it was like and anger a certain type of movement globalization and dislocation of the people from the world around them …”
Imperial Tax. In an interview this January, Naomi Klein said this about the Trump Administration: “The important thing to understand about what they’re doing, and where this fits in with nationalism, is they don’t believe that Americans should have to pay for America. … [other nations] are increasingly [funding] the United States by … different kinds of tariffs, levies, fees …”
Actually Existing Deglobalization. Similarly,
, a veteran of the anti-globalization movement, has argued: “the US establishment … views deglobalization as another form of empire-building.”
From the Crowd
Missing Mormonism.
adds important context missing from ’s piece about Bryan Johnson’s “Don’t Die” tech-religion:
Just wanted to add a few notes on Mormonism — the religious context Bryan Johnson’s is most familiar with — that make it all come together. LDS theology collapses the distinction between spirit and matter, such that God is believed to have a body, and people are believed to be resurrected with bodies in the next life — but they will be “exalted bodies,” advanced bodies of some kind. The features and capacities of these exalted bodies are a frequent topic of curiosity and speculation among Latter-day Saints. Most often, its used to talk about how we’ll enjoy family relationships (including sex) in the next life. If you watch Bryan Johnson’s documentary with Mormon eyes, you can see this kind of thinking about family all over the place — it explains the trauma of his divorce and separation of his kids, and why he is especially attached to his one son that likes him, such that he claims he wants to spend “forever” or “several lifetimes” with him. This is how Mormons typically talk about their spouses, siblings, kids, etc. lol. For those with a tech-brain, the theology also lends itself to thinking that we not only can, but should use all our scientific and technological capacities to advance ourselves as a species. The Mormon Transhumanist Association, which Bryan Johnson was long a part of, is dedicated to exploring these possibilities, centering a most notorious LDS teaching: “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.” Interestingly, there’s a strong feminine-coded subculture of Mormon women who do “energy work”/reiki — where again, you see a fervent collapse of spirit and matter, and practices that spring up around the synthesis of the two.
See you next week!
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Regarding Yglesias and Luttwak: Yglesias makes the common mistake of blaming the Jones Act for the decline of American shipbuilding. The real culprit is Reagan’s decision to stop subsidizing shipbuilders. It’s an industry it’s a good idea to subsidize (unlike, say, corn). The Jones Act serves a national security purpose by giving US merchant mariners chances to practice their craft so they’ll be ready if they’re needed in a major war.
I’m one of the few people who thinks NAFTA was a good idea but PNTR with China was a mistake. The US *gained* manufacturing jobs throughout the mid and late 90s, including in Obama-to-Trump states Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, and Wisconsin. It wasn’t until China joined the WTO that the mass exodus began.
It can be good to liberalize trade with a smaller neighbor that can benefit from your close attention. You can even call it a noble act of charity even though you’re also getting low prices out of it. It’s quite another matter to liberalize trade with a colossus that’s looking to become your great geopolitical rival. That’s a national security risk even though you get low prices out of it.