Revenge/Tribute Politics & U.S. Hegemony
- Rick Bonetti
- Mar 15, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 5
Some are dealing with the current crisis and chaos in American politics by taking a break from the media. I choose the opposite approach by taking a deeper dive and watching YouTube videos of PBS Newshour, Washington Week PBS and The Ezra Klein Show to try to make sense of the unfamiliar world we are now finding ourselves living in.
Ezra Klein's March 14, 2025, very engaging and smart interview of Gillian Tett, "Is the President ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?" on this YouTube video was a little over my head, so I had to dig deeper and find links to the various topics they discuss:
The President's "mercantilist, hegemonic, power" mindset
Resetting the global financial and trading system
The so-called "Mar-a-Lago Accord" (weakening the dollar while maintaining its dominance as the global reserve currency)
National populists (Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro)
techno-libertarians (i.e., Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, etc.)
Congressional Republicans
Scott Bessent, U.S. Treasury Secretary and acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Steven Ira Miran, current chair of the Council of Economic Advisers;
Karl Paul Polanyi, Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician; tariff strategy
Robert Lighthizer, U.S. Trade Representative
Tyler Cowen's thoughts on cultural power; collectivist/collaborative moral values
Market pain and global reactions to "detoxing the economy."
Performative tribute
Honor-based vs. shame-based morality system
Bond market
Book recommendations
Gillian Tett is chair of the editorial board for the Financial Times and she co-founded Moral Money, the paper's sustainability newsletter.
Four books Tett recommends are:
Albert O. Hirschman, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (1945)
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2014)
John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of Peace (1920)
Matthew Engelke, How to Think Like an Anthropologist (2019)
Thom Hartmann's March 17, 2025, article in The New Republic: The President's Imperial Fantasy: To Be Polk, McKinley, and Putin—All at Once: Trampling rights, imposing tariffs, gobbling up others’ territories. The President is imitating his role models to assert "from James Polk’s expansionist conquest to William McKinley’s imperialist scheming to Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian crackdowns, The President isn’t just following in their footsteps—he’s trying to outdo them all... Trump’s imperial fantasy isn’t just about power—it’s about dismantling democracy itself. Like Polk, he dreams of annexation; like McKinley, he thrives on manufactured conflict; and like Putin, he seeks absolute control."
Jonathan Rauch, in The Atlantic article One Word Describes The President, concludes that "the history of patrimonial rule suggests that their most effective approach will be hammering home the message that he is corrupt." PBS Newshour lays out the Administration's conflicts of interest..
Tett paints a picture of small countries looking for ways to pay tribute and appease the Emperor, as in the court of King Henry VIII or Louis XIV, or worse yet Europe of the 1930s.
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