Eden redux

Or, Donald and the argonauts

The human search for a golden age is ubiquitous and incessant. Every culture has its Eden, and every generation seeks its way back there. Curiously, cultures and generations that objectively are the best off are sometimes the most determined to recapture the golden age.

Donald Trump has challenged his compatriots to make America great again. They have responded sufficiently to elect him president twice, despite the country’s experiencing prosperity unmatched elsewhere and rarely bettered in America’s own history. Trump’s secret has been to magnify and mobilize dissatisfactions of various sorts and combine them under the single MAGA banner.

Since his January inauguration he’s launched a multipronged offensive to recapture what he portrays as the halcyon time of America. His strategy is either brilliantly eclectic or impossibly confused, depending on how things turn out.

Most striking is his war on the economics of the last century — or two or three. Trump’s philosophy of trade, with the emphasis it places on favorable trade balances, harks back to a time before Adam Smith published his 1776 anti-mercantilist manifesto The Wealth of Nations. Smith contended that trade was a good thing, not a threat. It raised the national standard of living, which was a better measure of a country’s wealth than what the government’s vaults held and its account books recorded. Smith’s view didn’t go unchallenged, but the success it produced in countries like the United States eventually eclipsed mercantilism, which faded away — until Trump revived it.

America was slower to embrace free trade per se, which was an essential corollary of Smith’s approach. But from the end of World War II until Trump’s first term, free trade was the guiding star of American trade policy. Trump’s avid embrace of tariffs —“Tariffs are the most beautiful words in the dictionary to me,” he said — have taken America back to the 1890s, when his hero William McKinley put his name on a particularly ambitious set of tariffs.

Simultaneously Trump has ordered an immigration policy that recalls the 1920s. After three centuries of essentially unfettered immigration — during which time various American individuals and groups actively encouraged immigration — Congress slammed the door on most would-be arrivals. A 1924 immigration act imposed hard caps on overall numbers and set quotas on individual countries. For the first time in American history, illegal immigration became an issue of general concern, for the simple reason that nearly all immigration (except from China) had previously been legal. During the 1960s and again in the 1980s the restrictions on immigration were eased, but now Trump appears intent on resetting the calendar to the late 1920s.

In Trump’s foreign policy, the golden age appears to be any time before World War II. His “America First” branding conjures the unilateralism of the antiwar movement associated with Charles Lindbergh, but it equally connotes the policy of every American president from George Washington to Herbert Hoover, save Woodrow Wilson. During that century and a half, the United States shunned foreign commitments, refusing to champion other countries’ causes or fight other countries’ wars. Trump’s foreign policy so far has been chiefly rhetorical. Whether the walk will match the talk remains to be seen. But if that walk takes America out of NATO and away from Ukraine and Taiwan, the effect will be retro-revolutionary. Leaders of other countries, starting with Canada, Mexico and most of Europe, are understandably preparing for just such a jolt.

In matters of domestic governance, Trump has unleashed Elon Musk to roll the executive branch back to something Calvin Coolidge would appreciate. Not for Musk — which is to say, not for Trump — any piece-by-piece dismantling of the bureaucracy. Rather a wholesale demolition. The thinking seems to come from Silicon Valley, with its mantras of “move fast and break things” and “ask for forgiveness, not permission.” Essential services might be eliminated, but if they are really essential they can be restored later. At first it seemed that Medicare and Social Security were off-limits to Musk’s crew, which would have confined the reset to the late 1960s. But comments by Musk suggest that the New Deal isn’t untouchable, bringing the 1920s into view.

The golden age of monetary policy for Trump appears to have ended in 1913, when Congress created the Federal Reserve and thereby took control out of the hands of elected officials. Trump has talked of firing Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed (whom Trump appointed in his first term), for pursuing policies that don't promote the Trump agenda. Of course, that was the point of the Fed’s creation. After a century during which monetary policy was a political football, and during which financial panics were common, Congress and Woodrow Wilson concluded that money was too important to be left to the politicians. Trump disagrees. Perhaps he aims to abolish the Fed entirely. But that would be hard — and unnecessary, if he can undermine the Fed’s independence by successfully sacking Powell.

Given the way presidential powers have evolved during the last century, Trump can largely dictate a return to his desired golden age in policy on trade, immigration and national security. For domestic matters, including monetary policy, he’ll need the cooperation of Congress.

The bigger question is whether the golden age will turn out as golden as Trump and his supporters hope. The problem is two-fold. First, golden ages were never so golden as they appear in retrospect. The reason Americans changed their laws and habits was that they didn’t like the times they were living in.

Second, even if the age had been golden to those alive then, it wouldn’t seem so to visitors from the future. The visitors would bring modern sensibilities and demands. The comparative simplicity of the 1950s appeals to some people today, but many of those people would miss the ability to jet across the country or around the world, to communicate instantly across time zones, to witness world events virtually in real time, to survive heart disease and numerous cancers, and to live, on average, a decade longer than people did back then.

Since at the moment we’re all on his ride, Americans should hope Trump’s time travels turn out well. If they don’t, it would hardly be the first time Eden disappointed.