[The] disappointment with West’s flirtation with right-wing politics, whether genuine or just a publicity stunt for his new album, raises an age-old debate about the separation (or lack thereof) between art and the artist—specifically, in this case, between the politics of art and the politics of the artist. As Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall tweeted last week:
This comparison might seem outrageous. Pound, the legendary American poet, stained his reputation by advocating for Benito Mussolini and broadcasting fascist messages on Italian radio during World War II. Trump, despite his authoritarian tendencies, is hardly Mussolini, nor are West’s tweets in the same category as Pound’s rants, which were laced with anti-Semitism.
But it’s a useful comparison precisely because Pound’s actions were so extreme: The still–running debate surrounding him—about whether an artist’s political views should shape how an audience views their work—can help clarify the new debate surrounding West…
Posts Tagged ‘Donald Trump’
“But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use it only as someone else prescribes?”*…
As Ravi Somaiya suggests, Ted Kaczynski— the Unabomber– and his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, were uncomfortably prescient about modern politics…
I was going through some old papers last week, when I came across two handwritten letters I received from Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, in 2017 and 2018.
My address was filled out in Kaczynski’s own stark, strangely spaced block capitals, precise and somehow odd. The return address was Florence Supermax prison in Colorado, a highly controlled and secured facility which houses a 9/11 conspirator, the cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, and the leaders of the Latin Kings and the Aryan Brotherhood, among other notorious, or notoriously dangerous, criminals.
Kaczynski was a gifted mathematician — he went to Harvard at 16 — and a loner, who abandoned his career to live in isolation and pursue a bombing campaign against the rise of technology, and the fall of the natural world, from 1978 until 1995. He was caught in 1996, and was serving several life sentences when he died in custody in 2023.
I wrote to him because I was fascinated by his combination of breathtaking prescience — his 35,000-word manifesto, published in 1995, is absolutely correct and reads like a description of modern life — and a cruelty and contempt for his fellow man that led him to squander that gift and kill three people and wound dozens of others in the service of fomenting a moronic fantasy revolution.
It’s a combination that defines modern politics — a solid basic intuition, matched with an idiot desire to hurt anyone who disagrees. And it gets at something in modern culture, which often asks whether we can enjoy the work of someone whose other actions we find morally lacking. I guess I thought if I understood Kaczynski better, I’d understand all that better too.
It was the wrong question, and thus an endeavor doomed to failure. But when I opened one of the letters I found that it had led me to ask him what he thought about Donald Trump. His answer was brilliant and also made me uncomfortable in a way that I still can’t quite describe.
He started by apologizing for the delay in replying. (Even if you find killing people acceptable, you still get a twinge if you keep someone waiting for a message.)
“There’s a lot to be said in regard to DT and the social and political phenomenon that he represents, but I don’t have the time to say it all here,” he wrote. “So I’ll just call your attention to the paragraph that appears on pages 52-53 of my book.”
This, in my limited experience, was very Kaczynski. He loved to be awkward, and elliptical. He also pointed out that the paragraph was written long before the notion of Trump as a political figure became a realistic one.
I got a copy of his book, and have to admit to a frisson as I opened it. I confirmed that he’d written the section in 2010. Then I found the pages he’d cited. It was one short paragraph. To understand it, you have to understand the underlying theory he has, which is detailed on pages 28 and 29:
“Biological organisms, evolving through natural selection, eventually invade every niche in which biological survival is possible at all, and, whatever measures may be taken to suppress them, some organisms will find ways of surviving nonetheless. Within any complex, large-scale society, a similar process will produce self-propagating systems that will invade every corner and circumvent all attempts to suppress them. These systems will compete for power without regard to the objectives of any government (or other entity) that may try to steer the society. Our argument—admittedly impossible at present to prove conclusively—is that these self-propagating systems will constitute uncontrollable forces that will render futile in the long run all efforts to steer the society rationally.”
The precise paragraph he cited goes on:
“Two competing, entirely legal self-prop systems that have arisen in the U.S. during the last few decades are the politically correct left and the dogmatic right (not to be confused with the liberals and conservatives of earlier times in America). This book is not the place to speculate about the outcome of the struggle between these two forces; suffice it to say that in the long run their bitter conflict may do more to prevent the establishment of a lastingly peaceful world order than all the bombs of Al Qaeda and all the murders of the Mexican drug gangs.”
He’s … right. Or, rather, I agree with him. I covered the rise of the Tea Party on the right, and Occupy on the left, at around the time he wrote it. And they have since risen from niche movements to define the entirety of our politics.
Each needs the other to secure its support and push it to greater extremes of ideology and violence. And the love-hate conflict between them is so destructive and widespread that it leaves little room for anything else.
And now I’m making the political argument of a conspiracist murderer. I spent a few days troubled over this, and then remembered that theory rarely survives contact with reality, no matter how brilliant the theorist.
Kaczynski was making the same mistake as the political groups he describes — he failed to understand that people fundamentally want to be happy, and get along with other people, and that they will find unexpected and unpredictable ways to get to that spot. He also failed to understand that nothing is permanent, and that nature works in cycles.
Intellectual humility was not his strong suit. In that, he was a man of our era, more than of his own…
“The Unabomber on Donald Trump,” from Bungalow Magazine.
Further to Somiya’s conclusion– and in fairness to Kaczynski– elsewhere in Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski channels Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander:
A new kind of society cannot be designed on paper. That is, you cannot plan out a new form of society in advance, then set it up and expect it to function as it was designed to do. People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under rational human control…
Full text of Kaczynski’s manifesto is here.
(Images above: left source; right source)
* Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future
###
As we fumble into the future, we might that it was on this date in 1582 that Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Poland introduced the Gregorian calendar. While this was “October 5” in the rest of the world, those four countries, adopting Pope Gregory XIII’s innovation, skipped ten days– so that there, the date shifted from October 4 the day before to October 15. With the shift, the calendar was aligned with the equinoxes, and the lunar cycles used to establish the celebration of Easter. Britain and its colonies resisted this Popish change, and used the Julian calendar for another century and a half, until September 2, 1752.
“What protectionism teaches us to do to ourselves in time of peace is what enemies seek to do to us in time of war”*…
This post, written on July 29, is dropping on August 1, the deadline set by President Trump for the imposition of “reciprocal tariffs.” Here, in spirit of a search for a silver lining, Paul Kedrosky with an argument that, while the traiffs are both prima facie and fundamentally a bad idea, they could lead to a good place…
Tariffs are dumb. They distort trade, favor inefficient local producers, cause trading partners to retaliate, and make people worse off than a world without them. On these points, economists almost universally agree.
But tariffs are not useless. They may even be sort of, almost, kinda, a … good idea in these very weird U.S. circumstances.
Hear me out, because three things are going on, so it can get messy:
- The U.S. is, as the line goes, an insurance company with an army, which has straitjacketed its budget, which I’ve written about previously.
- The U.S. hates taxes, and most voters are innumerate, so it finds silly ways to hide them.
- Tariffs are a kind of horrible, second-best solution to the above problems.
The first two points are mostly self-explanatory. Entitlements plus defence are now around 70% of the U.S. budget—see also, insurance company with an army—leaving little room to do much other than cut, unless you find new revenue. But new revenue is hard, because Americans hate income taxes, and have long resisted carbon taxes or a value-added tax (VAT). They aren’t coping well with what I’ve called life under 2%.
Enter tariffs. They raise money because consumers buy things. We can argue about whether the producing companies pay the tariff (they mostly don’t), or whether consumers pay it via higher prices (they mostly do), but the effect is the same: consumers buying things increases government revenue. That is tariff income.
So far, so … suboptimal. Because tariffs aren’t a good tool for this. I will come to why they aren’t very good in a few paragraphs, but they distort, create weird incentives, invite retaliation, etc.
A much better tool is a value-added tax (VAT), a broad tax applied to consumer purchases of goods and services. Most countries have one, including all of the OECD except for the U.S.
It is generally agreed that VATs are a good idea, that they can be less distorting than income taxes. And, most importantly, if you’re a government, they produce gobs of income for countries that have them. How much income? The average nation’s VAT income is around 6% of GDP.
So, why doesn’t the U.S. have a VAT of its own? After all, the country has what are often obfuscated as significant long-term fiscal challenges. These mostly revolve around trying to run a costly modern social democracy on a low-tax system. This mathematically intractable “challenge” is made worse by a healthcare system unrivaled for all the looting intermediaries demanding to be seen instead as paragons of competition and capitalism.
There are various reasons for having no U.S. VAT, but the most important is in the name: it is a tax. And Americans hate taxes. Just ask them. The U.S. government cheerily indulges them in their hatred of taxes by cutting the taxes they can see, like income taxes, and hiding the ones they can’t, like the pre-tax corporate deductibility of healthcare premiums (costing $300b and 1.5% of GDP). This has costly & malign effects, like a 6+% structural budgetary deficit and the most screwed-up and expensive healthcare system in the world…
… The U.S. is foregoing approximately $2.8 trillion annually in potential VAT revenue at an OECD-average rate. Even at half that rate—because, America!—a U.S. VAT might produce, all else equal, around $1.4 trillion a year.
To put that in a kind of context, the current U.S. budget deficit is around $1.8-trillion a year. A VAT set at even half of OECD average levels would nearly zero out the U.S. deficit. (And, of course, reforming U.S. healthcare by eliminating premium pre-tax deductibility, instituting universal Medicare Lite, and requiring catastrophe insurance would flip the U.S. to surpluses, but I digress.)
Let’s now turn to tariffs. Like a VAT, they are broad consumption taxes, just not applied defensibly. They are applied only to imports, not to everything bought and sold in the country. This makes no sense, unless you think tariffs aren’t taxes (they are), and you think tariffed companies pay them (they don’t). So, Americans.
But tariffs are a species of VAT, albeit a poorly designed one. A universal tariff on imported goods—say, at 15%—would raise VAT-lite revenues. Based on recent data, U.S. annual imports are around $4 trillion. Applying a uniform 15% tariff to manufactured goods, which is 80-ish% of that. might yield roughly $300-$400 billion annually. While this is a fraction of the revenue of an actual VAT, it is real money. The choice then is not between a perfect VAT and an imperfect tariff, but between an imperfect tariff and continued reliance on deficit financing or distortionary taxes on labor and capital income.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, you might rightly protest. This is just a bad solution. Sure, but it is, in practical terms, a “second-best solution”, even if it is also perhaps the second-worst.
We should want more second-best solutions, economics tells us, if the alternative is doing nothing. There is a framework, with which I won’t bore you, that says it’s okay to do something less than perfect, if by doing so you counteract some of the problems preventing you from doing the best thing.
In this case, American politics prevents an actual VAT from happening, so perhaps tariffs aren’t so bad, if the alternative real distortion is structural deficits. To that way of thinking, distorting trade via a uniform tariff (a second distortion) may increase overall welfare relative to the status quo (deficits), despite being shitty trade policy.
And, if we want to spitball here, tariffs could even lay the groundwork politically and psychologically for a future transition to an actual big-boy VAT. Citizens and businesses might recognize that consumption taxation you can see is better than consumption taxation that you can’t. A future administration could leverage dissatisfaction with tariffs to propose replacing them with a more economically efficient and lower-rate VAT. Politically, the VAT would then become not a “new” tax but rather a tax cut (in rate terms only) eliminating import tariffs.
The debate over tariffs versus VATs is about the current structural problem in U.S. budget, a refusal to recognize life under 2%. Economically ideal policies frequently fail politically, leaving policymakers with second-best solutions. Tariffs, undeniably flawed and distortionary, are a usefully ugly compromise. They generate meaningful revenue, shift some production domestically, and potentially serve as a stepping-stone toward a VAT.
[Lest we got our hope up too high… Kedrosky is addressing the revenue half of the equation. But where and how that money is spent (whether raised by tariffs or a VAT) obviously matters absolutely. It’s clear from the examples he cites along the way, that Kedrosky would see that income most usefully applied to the social infrastructure that, as he observes, we have (to put it politely) neglected. Sadly, the “Big Beautiful Bill” and the rhetoric that surrounds it suggest that the Trump administration has other, darker plans, beefing up Defense and Homeland Security and creating a “sovereign wealth fund“… all of which could all-too-easily (and obviously) go horribly wrong, creating more damage in the form of social infrastructure destruction, and souring the public on the very idea of Federal action. Still, as Kedrosky concludes…]
Hey, a boy can dream, can’t he?…
Tariffs are a bad idea.. but could they lead somewhere good? “Tariffs are Dumb Enough to (Almost) Work,” from @paulkedrosky.com.
###
As we search for silver linings, we might recall that it was on this date in 2023, that Justice Deartment Special Counsel Jack Smith unveiled the case alleging that then-former President Donald Trump broke several laws in his attempts to overturn the 2020 election…
On June 8, 2023, a grand jury in the Southern Florida U.S. District Court indicted Trump on 37 felony counts, including charges of willful retention of national security material, obstruction of justice and conspiracy, relating to his removal and retention of presidential materials from the White House after his presidency ended. Thirty-one of the counts fell under the Espionage Act.
On August 1, 2023, a grand jury for the District of Columbia U.S. District Court issued a four-count indictment of Trump for conspiracy to defraud the United States under Title 18 of the United States Code, obstructing an official proceeding and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding under the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, and conspiracy against rights under the Enforcement Act of 1870 for his conduct following the 2020 presidential election through the January 6 Capitol attack.
Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges in both indictments. Trials were scheduled but never held.
On July 15, 2024, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the classified documents prosecution against Donald Trump, siding with the former president’s argument that special counsel Jack Smith was unlawfully appointed.
On November 25, 2024, Smith announced that he was seeking to drop all charges against Donald Trump in the aftermath of Trump’s victory in the 2024 United States presidential election. The Justice Department, by policy, does not prosecute sitting presidents of the United States.
Smith submitted his final report to the Justice Department on January 7, 2025, and resigned three days later…
… [In fact] The special counsel prepared a two-volume final report: the first volume about the election obstruction case, and the second volume about the classified documents case.
Trump’s lawyers were allowed to review Smith’s final report from January 3–6, 2025 in a room where they could not use their electronic devices. They objected to the report’s release. On January 6, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira (who could still face criminal charges in the classified documents case asked the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to stop its release to avoid influencing their case, and the next day, Judge Aileen Cannon blocked the report’s release until three days after the 11th Circuit decided. Later in the evening on January 7, the special counsel provided both volumes to the attorney general, and the next day, the Department of Justice said it would release the first volume publicly and may provide a redacted version of the second volume for a limited review by select members of Congress. On January 9, the 11th Circuit allowed the release of the first volume, and on January 13, Cannon said she would likewise allow it, given that her own authority was limited to the classified documents case. On January 14, the 137-page first volume was released.
– source
The 137-page report that was released is here.
The matter did not, of course, rest there. In 2024, in Trump v. United States, filed in response to the Smith indictments, the Supreme Court determined that presidential immunity from criminal prosecution presumptively extends to all of a president’s “official acts” – with absolute immunity for official acts within an exclusive presidential authority that Congress cannot regulate. (In practice, as we’ve seen in 2025, his immunity seems to extend even to things that Congress is supposed to regulate.)
“Power always reveals”*…
Apposite to yesterday’s post, a provocative piece by Ben Ansell, who is reacting to a [terrific] piece by Henry Farrell in which Farrell, as he contemplates Trump’s moves, unpacks the “coordination” problems facing– and, Farrell suggests, often limiting– autocratic rulers…
… But you will notice an assumption I and Henry have been making – that Trump is like any other authoritarian leader. I suspect that in lots of ways Trump does wish to behave like one – certainly the treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his current refusal to follow court judgments meets that mark.
But Trump is attempting this in an otherwise democratic system and I think there is a risk that we overstate the degree to which that system has already deteriorated by assuming that the language and logic that we use to describe authoritarianism fits his case. Part of the risk is we give up on democracy while it’s still here. But the other danger is that we think Trump behaves like a rational authoritarian leader, a la Svolik, when it’s all just bluntly a lot dumber than that…
… In an earlier post I referred to Donald Trump as a ‘chaotic authoritarian’. I don’t think it’s implausible that a democracy could have such a figure as a leader, though I do think it’s unlikely that it would remain democratic indefinitely under such leadership.
But in the absence of already having subverted elections, stymied courts, shut down the media, banned opponents and the other types of effective institutional backsliding that are the tell-tale signs of a democracy dying, I think we might do better to think about how such a figure operates in, what for now, is a democracy.
The temptation when talking about dictators is to reach for Thomas Hobbes. We depict them as the Leviathan – imposing order on the body politic to prevent chaos but also any rivals. Hobbes’ vision was after all a painstaking justification for monarchical absolutism.
If you are not familiar with Leviathan, well do read it, it’s a banger. But the very basic gist is a theory of government built from the ground up. Hobbes even starts with a slightly rococo account of how we process sensations. But his core mechanism is to imagine a world without government – his famous state of nature – in which every individual was essentially on their own. A self-help system if you will, but not the kind in the woo-woo psychology section of the bookstore – the kind where if you don’t look after number one, you’ll get an axe in the back of the head.
The Hobbesian state of nature is anarchy and life in it is – say it with me – ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. And so anyone living in this state would seek to escape this ceaseless terror and have some entity that could guarantee security. Hobbes is a social contract theorist, and the contract upon which we could all be presumed to agree is a third party that can ruthlessly crush insecurity. An absolute sovereign power that would protect its subjects…
… The Hobbesian vision of the state is draconian of course and in… err… pretty sharp contrast with the social contract theories of John Locke or Jean Jacques Rousseau. But one way it has come down to us is in how we think about authoritanism. As about order and control, crushing dissent mercilessly, but also preventing anarchy, rebellion, and so forth. It is governing with an iron fist. Rational authoritarianism if you will.
Whatever Trump is trying to achieve, it’s not hitting this mark. Instead of authoritarianism containing chaos, it is chaos personified. Instead of quelling the anarchic state of nature, it is spreading anarchy and confusion. Hobbes’ frontispiece Leviathan is a steady ruler, holding sword and staff, made up out of their ordered subjects [In contrast to the disintegrating beast in the illustation above]…
… Hence, it’s not clear to me that the standard tools we use to think about authoritarianism accordingly make that much sense with Trump. Is he really thinking about how to coordinate among the elites to keep his support base? Because he’s not doing a brilliant job here having already lost the support of the Wall Street journal editorial board, a litany of very conservative judges, and increasingly corporate elites…
… what I find most interesting about Trump’s anti-Leviathan is that his rule is creating anarchy everywhere else too. And that means not only are his promises not credible but nor are his threats…
[Ansell reviews Trumps’ attack on universities, his approach to tariffs, and trade policy, his “crackdown” on immigration, and his foreign policy (or lack thereof)…]
… We will spend a lot of time over the next few years trying to figure out if Trump’s America remains a democracy. Already the main indices we use are starting to downgrade the USA. I struggle as to whether that coding is premature or not – we will of course know much more by the midterms about the stability and freedom of elections, though by then it could be too late.
It is very clear that Trump wishes to act as an authoritarian. But it is not yet obvious to me that analysing him using the logic of dictatorship makes sense. Because he lacks the control, the ruthlessness, and the rationality of normal authoritarian leaders. As Henry says in his post, ‘absolute power can be a terrible weakness.’ True. However, for many – perhaps most – dictators, absolute power is a terrible (in the original sense of that word) strength. Think to the horrors of the twentieth century.
That, however, is not Donald Trump. He may be the master of chaos. But he is not the Leviathan…
What if we abandoned the social contract for the state of nature? “Donald Trump’s Anti-Leviathan,” from @benansell.bsky.social (with @himself.bsky.social).
* “Power doesn’t always corrupt. Power always reveals. When you have enough power to do what you always wanted to do, then you see what the guy always wanted to do.” – Robert Caro (riffing on Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”) Or as David Brin put it: “it is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible.”
###
As we rein in reigns, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe and Adolf Hitler’s designated successor as leader of Nazi Germany, wired the Führer asking permission to assume leadership of the crumbling regime. The telegram caused an infuriated Hitler to strip Göring of power and to appoint new successors, Joseph Goebbels and Karl Dönitz, as chancellor and head of state, respectively.
“Bad artists always admire each others’ work”*…
Woody Allen, Picasso… now Kanye West: Can one separate the artist from the art?
Consider more completely at “Is Kanye West ‘the Ezra Pound of Rap’?“; then see “The Picasso Problem: Why We Shouldn’t Separate the Art From the Artist’s Misogyny” and “Can you separate the artist from the art?”
Meantime, see a series of Kanye’s infamous recent tweets, reproduced as New Yorker cartoon captions, e.g.:
Then, for a very different point-of-view, see “The Overground Hell Road: The Similarities Between Kanye and Gandhi Are Scary.”
* Oscar Wilde
###
As we govern our glance, we might send (notional) birthday greetings to Sir Harry Paget Flashman VC, KCB, KCIE; he was (notionally) born on this date in 1822. Originally created as a minor character by Thomas Hughes in his semi-autobiographical Tom Brown’s School Days— Flashman is a bully who torments Tom Brown– Flasman got a second– and much more expansive life when George MacDonald Fraser decided to write his “memoir.” The result runs to 12 hilarious historical novels– collectively known as “The Flashman Papers“– in which Hughes’ bully becomes an illustrious Victorian soldier while remaining “a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and, oh yes, a toady.”
“What’s the point of having great knowledge and keeping them all to yourself?”*…
One of the most attractive books in history, a colossal best seller, everybody knows this, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Really successful book, believe me. Why F.? I put my initial in the middle, I think it’s more normal that way, but everybody has his own style…
From the glorious Sherman Oaks Review of Books, an imagination of Donald Trump’s review of The Great Gatsby: “Celebrity Book Reviews: Donald on Scott.”
[image above: source]
* Donald J. Trump, Why We Want You To Be Rich: Two Men, One Message
###
As we rethink the classics, we might send send elegiac birthday greetings to James Arthur Baldwin; he was born on this date in 1924. A novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic, he charted the unspoken but palpable intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America, and their inevitable tensions. His essays (e.g., Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time) and his novels (perhaps especially Giovanni’s Room) shaped a generation of writers. Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison eulogized Baldwin in The New York Times:
You knew, didn’t you, how I needed your language and the mind that formed it? How I relied on your fierce courage to tame wildernesses for me? How strengthened I was by the certainty that came from knowing you would never hurt me? You knew, didn’t you, how I loved your love? You knew. This then is no calamity. No. This is jubilee. “Our crown,” you said, “has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do,” you said, “is wear it.”
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