Hello, welcome to Money Talks from Slate Money, our show where we talk to the most interesting and intelligent people in the world and get them to share their wisdom with us.
I'm Felix Salmon of Axios, and today I am joined by Quinn Slobodian. Quinn, welcome. Very good to be here. Thank you. Introduce yourself. Who are you? I am a historian. I teach international history at Boston University, and I also write books, some of them with more contemporary relevance. Most recently, I wrote a book called Crack Up Capitalism, Market Radicals, and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. ♪
And then before that, you wrote a book about the rise of neoliberalism. Yep. Yeah, I wrote a book called Globalists, the End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, which kind of went from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire up to the foundation of the World Trade Organization. This crack up capitalism was kind of the sequel to that, like when the libertarians got squirrely kind of thing. And now we have this whole new Trump era. And I cannot wait to get stuck in with you on the question of
the degree to which and even whether that changes anything.
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Let's fast forward through the Habsburgs and the World Trade Organization and get to the little sort of micro states and free ports and all of the rest of it that were the subject of crack up capitalism. There was a lot in your book about sort of Peter Thiel and Seedsteading and this sort of dream of sort of capitalist autonomy.
And we know that that crowd, that Silicon Valley crowd is incredibly influential in the current Trump administration. So I guess that's a good place to start is like, where are we right now? And do you see that just accelerating?
Yeah, so that book, the Crack Up Capitalism book, does begin with Peter Thiel. In 2009, he has a couple of pretty epic public interventions. One is to say that he no longer thinks democracy and economic freedom are compatible. Therefore, he thinks we need to no longer do politics the usual way, but figure out ways to exit and escape existing forms of politics.
And then he starts to sort of put some flesh to the bones of that idea by funding, among other things, the Seasteading Institute, which was created by Milton Friedman's grandson, Patry Friedman, with the idea of setting up these sort of ad hoc new polities on decommissioned oil rigs or
barges, all in the interest of, in Thiel's mind, greatly multiplying the number of polities in the world. So he hoped that there would be several thousand places where people could live, capital could hide, experimentation could happen, offshoring of a whole new accelerated kind could take place. That was where his head was at circa 2009.
I think that those of us who have been following people like Peter Thiel in the last few years know that he made a pretty hard conversion to MAGA and the Trump cause, speaking at the Republican National Convention, sitting on Trump's transition team in 2017. And my read of that through the book is that the easier thing than starting your own state is just taking over an existing one.
So the Silicon Valley vision that used to be about exit and creating startup societies on kind of far-flung Caribbean islands has now been scaled up considerably by focusing its attentions on how the American government can be kind of retrofitted for their material interests. Right. So the idea is you don't need to create your own little baby polity in the East Bay if you can...
just turn all of the United States into Hong Kong, effectively. Exactly. Because if you look at the kind of things that they say in their many online talks and slide decks and so on, they actually, people like Balaji Srinivasan, who's also close to the circle of sort of Silicon Valley tech right people, they'll often make reference to things like the American Revolution or the Constitution as having been early examples of kind of startup societies.
The Constitution they just see as a kind of rather outmoded operating system for what needs to be updated. The latest interview that Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug,
did for the New York Times suggested similarly that FDR had, in his mind, run the United States like a startup during the New Deal. So the idea of running the U.S. like a startup society, you know, scaling up those small experiments and just doing it at the level of the continental United States,
is something that they've been toying with. And now I think, you know, to the great exhilaration and many of them have this kind of chance to make their dreams come true. So in my mind, if I, if I think of the Hong Kong model or the Singapore model or whatever Paul Romer was up to in Honduras or any of these kinds of things, it's all about locating yourself in
within this incredible global flow of goods and capital. And that seems to be profoundly in opposition to the MAGA trend
drive to, you know, sort of isolationism and tariffs and reshoring and all of that kind of thing. Has anyone even attempted to square these two things? Yeah, no, I absolutely see what you mean. And the charm of a place like Dubai or Singapore is partially its scale, its smallness, right? The fact that it could be kind of
quickly transformed and it could sort of follow the tides of the demand of the global export market. You could just build out new sectors kind of overnight and there was no friction of things like labor laws, you know, legacy institutions that might stand in the way.
So I think it depends on how you look at the United States. There is a tendency, I think, to imagine a kind of centralizing thrust in the mega vision that it's about, you know, reinforcing America as one kind of block. But I think that the Silicon Valley folks, the Andresens and the Teals and Raboises and Musks, they see America perhaps a bit more accurately as a kind of itself, an archipelago of America.
very diverse jurisdictions, different sets of tax incentives and inducements, different kinds of social and political laws from state to state, and even from city to city. And the way that they've been voting with their feet moving from San Francisco to Texas or Miami since 2020 especially has shown how much flex there is there and seeing America itself as a kind of a galaxy of alternative micro spaces.
And I think their program as they're bringing it into the Trump coalition is also based on that idea. It might speak a language of sort of top level America, but it's about decentralizing decision making. It's about kind of putting different parts of America into competition with each other for scarce mobile resources, etc.
And I think that it's, if anything, about draining central authority and power. Why else do you eliminate multiple federal agencies except to kick that down to the states and down to the county and city beyond that? So that's the internal logic, I think, to this move from seemingly an infatuation with small offshore islands to this massive, almost continent-sized country. Where every state is its own
Offshore islands, basically. Which Donald Trump has been kind of gesturing in that direction. He's been talking about abolishing FEMA. As you say, he's got this kind of Doge agenda to make the...
government much smaller. But at the same time, he does seem to represent kind of the apotheosis of centralized decision-making. Everything is really happening in the Oval Office. He is this very central, almost, you know, in Jarvin's term, monarchical figure. How does that square? Well, I mean, if you see him as this kind of CEO monarch, as someone like, you know, Jarvin would optimistically see someone like Trump as
The fact that you have centralized executive power, same way if you had centralized corporate governance power in the figure of a CEO, doesn't mean that the decisions they make are going to be evenly distributive in their outcomes, right? I mean, the decisions that Trump makes are not equally affecting all parts of the United States. They are also extremely redistributive in very skewed geographical ways. So I think, you know,
Using him as the conduit to change policy, which then kicks out as the flow of investments and resources in a very differential way is not really very inconsistent. I think especially if you look at the way that the United States has kind of internalized globalization pressures since 2008.
the 1980s, especially things like tax avoidance and tax havens, the United States has turned itself into a kind of archipelago of different tax havens from Wyoming to Delaware to the island of Manhattan, which has a kind of a different tax status.
Donald Trump himself profited from this or touch on this in the book, the idea of kind of using zoning and tax subsidies and tax holidays to induce developers to move back into inner cities was kind of how Trump rebuilt his empire in midtown Manhattan. Once again, this is kind of like the state turns on the faucets to make the cash flow here rather than there. And you often do it because of reasons of, you know,
Patron-client relationships with this or that politician, certain constituents you want to win back. So that, you know, I think that having one hand on the tap, so to speak, in a strong executive actually makes it even easier to create a really unequal landscape.
As you say, one of the sort of core beliefs of the Jarvin-Teal axis is that democracy is not fit for purpose in this kind of a world. So in their world, if we are creating this archipelago, I guess the idea is that
Really, the decision-making is being outsourced by the revealed references of the owners of capital? Well, I think that's what's interesting about this present moment and how I think it's not quite just old-style, you know, make the state so small you can drown it in the bathtub style libertarianism. I think the vision of someone like Andreasen
or Teal or Musk does have sort of strains of Singaporean state-driven technological export-oriented investments. So there is a vision, I think, of a strong hand of a state, not just neutrally rewarding people based on who can get the most efficiency or the lowest bottom line, but there is some kind of idea of the transformative capacity of a state informed by the private sector.
So I think you can also see parts of how they understand the state as being co-optable in a kind of longer-term horizon of investment by the Stargate announcement recently, where Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son and Larry Ellison announced this $100 billion, perhaps notionally, imaginarily, half a trillion dollar investment.
investment, you know, next to Trump in the rostrum. It is a combination, I think, of, you know, rewarding loyal constituents, finding the best bottom line for certain kind of low value chain forms of manufacturing or service production. But then at the upper end, I think there is some idea of how can you kind of pursue and push out like the frontier of
productivity and innovation by having a state that listens to the makers, so to speak, like listens to the people that see themselves as having the best and most long-term ideas, which is the, of course, self-appointed kind of profits in the world of kind of Sand Hill Road and the Silicon Valley VC class. And the idea is that those kind of billionaires sort of
take upon themselves something of the sort of the role of running the society and allocating the capital, and they are the sort of the new monarchs? Well, I mean, they are the enlightened philosopher advisors to the monarch, right? I mean, I think that's the interesting kind of division of labor, right? I mean, it's not quite that
Teal or Andreas and or Musk want to themselves be the sovereign if they have someone who can do all of that ground clearing and consent building and legitimation that Trump has been amazingly so effective at doing. I mean, one thing I was thinking about recently is that I think that this is partially this alliance is coming about through a kind of misapprehension of what made the Chinese economic growth model so successful.
China too kind of upends some of our assumptions about where power lies. Like, is it a highly centrally planned and organized economy or is it a very decentralized economy where there's fierce competition among private enterprises for soft credit and support at the state level? And then some few winners sort of battle their way out of the pack. The
Assumption, I think, of an Andreasen or an Altman is that China's success was by a handpicked number of enlightened oligarchs sort of getting the ear and the support of the great leader and then rolling out their enormous infrastructure project from Beijing out or from the Beltway out in this case.
But in fact, those people who study this stuff know that's not how China works, that it's more the latter. It's much more decentralized than it appears. There's actually a lot more kind of local level competition between private, semi-state, and state-owned actors. And it's not the case that Jack Ma, to name someone who's recently dethroned, is just kind of ushered into Xi Jinping's office and then tells him, like, this is how we should structure the Chinese economy.
So that is very much on the mind of people like Peter Thiel. He wrote a few years ago the preface to a reissue of The Sovereign Individual by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, a kind of sacred text of the libertarian right. And in that, he said, basically, we have two challenges that they didn't foresee. We have China and we have A.I.,
And I think this attempt to kind of use the locomotive of the federal government and the federal purse to outpace China, specifically in AI investment,
is their attempt to kind of do state capitalism better than what they see as the current state capitalist competition. And what we have seen, just to make this very obvious, is since Trump's election, we've seen a very significant rise in Palantir stock.
from what was already basically an all-time high. And I think the rationale of the market there is exactly what you're talking about, which is that Peter Thiel is going to have Trump's ear and is going to be able to direct some of that sort of federal funding into AI and whatnot, basically via through into Palantir.
Absolutely. I think the interesting thing, too, is to compare, let's say, the relationship of Trump to people like Thiel to what immediately preceded him. So the Biden-Harris sort of interlude.
exactly bad for Silicon Valley, right? I mean... It was great. Exactly. The half-billion-dollar contract that Palantir signed with the Department of Defense and that Anduril, you know, Palmer Luckey's company, signed similarly were Biden-era contracts. So this trend over the last few decades of outsourcing sort of the private service provision that the state used to do itself to people like Musk and SpaceX, to people like Palantir,
volunteer and teal is something that's been like a secular trend through democratic and republic administrations and what's amazing to me is why they would take what would seem like a kind of a risky move to proverbially like step out of the shadows step from the west coast to the east coast and
take a seat right next to Trump, considering how well the system was working for them already. It does seem like kind of a bold maneuver to go from like arm's length enrichment, which was going great guns, to actually trying to take a conjoined role in the practice of governance, right? Musk trying to get a literal office inside the White House until recently.
My theory on that one is that the Steve Bannon MAGA right is very skeptical of big tech in general, and that they felt that if they weren't inside the house, that Trump was a much bigger threat to them than Biden was.
I think that's right. I mean, I think there is like a bear hug kind of human shield quality to this, for sure. But even then, it is a bit epochal. I mean, if you think back through different kind of cycles of American political economy, it wasn't the case that, you know, the CEO of General Motors or General Electric was really getting an office inside the White House, right? There was a more of a symbiotic relationship that worked for both of them from a slight distance.
But I do think this kind of way that especially some of the people we've mentioned many times, the Andreassons, the Thiels, fancy themselves as kind of philosophers means that they are kind of impatient with anyone acting as their surrogate. And they sort of have this idea that only they can convey the truth and the orders directly to the new CEO king.
We need to take a quick break, but when we come back, Quinn will explain to all of us how to interpret this desire that Trump has to take over the Panama Canal and Greenland.
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It pays to discover. Based on the February 2024 Nielsen Report. Learn more at discover.com slash credit card. Widening this out a little bit geopolitically, let me ask you about one of the bigger Bs
that Donald Trump has in his bonnet, which is that he really seems genuinely to want to annex the Panama Canal and the entire island of Greenland. This is the kind of thing that America has not done in living memory. So I think a lot of people are struggling to understand any kind of sort of historical context for this. But as a historian who's happy to talk about the Habsburg Empire, like, what do you make of that?
Yeah, I think one actually does need to go back to the era of the end of the Habsburg Empire, because one of the kind of starting points of the globalist book that I described was that in the 20th century, you kind of had the creation of the puzzle of global governance, really, and global economic governance specifically. How do you reconcile, on the one hand, a world economy that's ever more interdependent,
and a world after empires in which the principle of national self-determination means you have ever more jurisdictions. So you have like this dense mosaic of patchwork of governments who think of themselves as being autonomous or independent. And at the same time, they're all plugged into this one big interdependent ball of relationships we call the global economy.
So how do you prevent those individual nation states from being obstacles to the free flow of goods, the free flow of labor, the international division of production, and so on? I think that is kind of the central riddle of global economic governance. And different things were proposed over the years, right? From multilateral trade agreements to bilateral investment treaties and so on. But across the 20th century, there was a kind of assumption that
this basic premise of the sacrosanct quality of political self-determination wasn't really something you could call into question. It was kind of like, that is now the new normal, the new natural. Borders may be arbitrary and just kind of part of the weird legacy of empires, but you nevertheless kind of treat them as if they're permanent for the most part. And to contravene that idea would be to
go against one of the basic norms of people's idea of how international relations should work.
Of course, Putin is the one who most obviously in recent memory has overstepped that by the invasion of Ukraine that did come as a great shot to many people. But it wasn't too much earlier that the United States invaded Iraq on false premises in 2003. And similarly, through the idea of national self-determination into question,
So Trump is not kind of operating out of a clear field here. This is not quite a shot out of the blue. This is, I think, consistent with
Adventurous American foreign policy, extremely adventurous Russian foreign policy. And now we've upset that ground rule about the sanctity of national borders. And he is a real estate developer is just running wild with it. He just he sees geopolitics as real estate. And if you can offer the right price, you know, then it's almost against the rules of the game that the seller should be able to say no.
I think he treats Middle Eastern politics like a real estate deal too. And the fact that he sent a real estate guy as his special envoy to the Middle East supports that too. The fact that Jared Kushner is very active in real estate.
investment in the Albanian space and in the Gulf is part of that too. And it's extremely unsettling. Someone asked me recently what I thought the most kind of startling aspect of the early Trump presidency was from the point of view of a historian. And that's what I said. I said, the idea that he may actually annex Greenland against the will of a fellow NATO member, an ally like Denmark is...
It would be a kind of unprecedented transgression of norms, I think, in the 21st century anyway. And we all know that there's nothing that Trumpists love more than transgressing norms. So that makes it even more attractive in its own way. Yeah. I mean, usually, look, I mean, we've been here before. We had Trump won. In 2017, we all remember the early weeks and months were filled with
attention-catching, headline-grabbing actions, which nevertheless hit judiciary guardrails and eventually were scaled back. And arguably, this is why Bannon was shown the door, because his big splash-out ideas actually ended up mostly grinding into the ground. So we're used to him talking big and then kind of pulling back. But if this goes through, if he forces Denmark to cede the enormous, as you say, island of Greenland, then
then I do think we're in a kind of, we have to start thinking about the categories we're using to describe what's going on all over again, because it takes us back more to the era of high imperialism and the 19th century and kind of makes this 20th century moment look like a bit of a strange interlude. It's a good, you know, Gen Xer. I grew up
sort of just believing as an article of faith that democracy is a good thing and national sovereignty is a good thing. Now, as you say, there are a bunch of sort of swadison thinkers and intellectuals are coming out and telling me that I was completely wrong about that. Is this a real thing?
Is this a live issue? And is there like a way that a normal sensible person should think about that kind of thing? Yeah. I mean, part of the point for me in writing the crack up capitalism book was to give us a more of a medium term narrative within which we could make sense of, you know,
the very question you're asking. So I think there was a kind of baseline assumption in the world of like op-eds and punditry that after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, liberal democracy was the only game in town. Democracy and capitalism were mutually complementary and self-reinforcing, even if both needed to kind of
work out their differences. Martin Wolf uses the analogy of a marriage in his writing. They were like, no, it's a hard marriage, but they could figure things out. And that suddenly out of nowhere, 2016 arrived and Brexit, Trump, next year, alternative for Germany, wave of right-wing populisms. Suddenly the era of peaceful democracy had been disturbed and
And what I write about in the book is that right from the end of the Cold War, people were talking about a basic problem between the supposed compatibility between democracy and capitalism. One of my favorite examples is, you know,
everyone's favorite touchstone, Fukuyama's end of history article in 1989 later turned into a book. The first thing he published after the end of history article was about what he called Asia's soft authoritarian alternative. And it was about Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore. It was about the success of more or less single party rule in Taiwan and South Korea in the repressive years after the Second World War.
And his point was actually who's been succeeding. It's not really that there's a direct relationship between rising democracy and capitalist success in the modern world. We might be straining that assumption.
And into the 90s and early 2000s, I just think there's more and more examples of that. I mean, my favorite example is Dubai. One of the things I talk about is the rise of nation branding in the early 2000s, you know, where countries all had like their new slogans, like incredible India, this, that, and the other thing. Ambitious Japan. Yeah, no, they were all, you know, up in lights and they all had their pavilions at the World Economic Forum. And one of the things I was just literally reading like industry magazines in the nation branding, you know,
you know, subfield. And one of the things they asked is, do people actually care whether these places are democracies or not? And the answer was like a resounding no.
Dubai and Singapore were habitually ranked extremely high in the early 2000s in terms of their favorability, positive image on the part of average travelers and average tourists, even though, as we know, especially Dubai, but Singapore too, are far from ideal democracies. So I think that era of the 90s hyper-competitive globalization was actually producing many templates and models of aspiration that
that had nothing to do with democracy. And that now when the Gulf especially is such an important place for Trump and his family and seems to offer a kind of template for how he wants to do American capitalism, I think we can see more clearly that there was always an undemocratic capitalist alternative.
And much of what gets called a kind of backlash against globalization is actually more like a front lash, you know, embracing these champions, actually, of the post-Cold War decades.
Yeah, I'm thinking a lot about things like Rwanda in this context, which has managed to brand itself very successfully among the Davos crew as being this sort of economic success story. Also has managed to brand itself among the sort of Peter Diehl crew as this kind of opportunity to do things like
you know, work with the British government on, on resettling asylum seekers or whatever the crazy thing that the Tories wanted to do and where its ability to do all of these things like was in many ways a function of, um,
the fact that it was not a democracy and you have this guy basically just calling all the shots and everyone's like yeah isn't it good if you can just have one person in charge and not have to worry about democracy yeah and there were new kind of optics and rankings that were created to specifically reinforce this alternative vision so one of the things i also talk about
is the creation of an index of economic freedom, which the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation created in the 1990s. And it was designed to provide an alternative to the Freedom House rankings of the world's countries according to their level of political and civil freedom and effectively their level of democracy. The neoliberal intellectuals, including Milton Friedman, Peter Bauer, Charles Murray, got together and quite literally said,
This is not a good ranking of the world's nations. This is based on democracy. Democracy is often not the most important thing. In fact, why don't we rank the world according to levels of economic freedom? How easy is it to open a business? How much banking secrecy is there? Is there arbitration courts? How well is free trade protected? Is there a stable currency?
And so they created their own rankings in the 1990s, and they explicitly kept democracy out of the indicators that they were using. And who was number one and two, swapping places for 20 years, Hong Kong and Singapore, the places that were being held up as paragons of economic freedom. And when they did the retroactive version, really strange things happened. So
At the height of military dictatorship in Guatemala and Honduras, when they did their retroactive rankings for the mid-70s, those countries were in the top 10. The most economically free places were places that were literally conducting civil war against indigenous people and disappearing large numbers of the political opponents.
So for me, it's a pretty dystopian lens to see human progress through and to sort of evaluate global trends through. But I think it's on the rise. I think it's actually triumphant. And I think this is the optic and lens through which Kushner and the Silicon Valley boys kind of see the world in global history. I think we've all kind of forgotten the Biden years already. But if we can try and think back to that,
that ancient history. Was that narrative, was it also on the rise during the Biden years and now it's just being accelerated? Well, I think actually that the Biden years for historians will be quite interesting to look back at because one of the things that was happening very actively, especially in the first year or so of the Biden administration internally,
was a self-conscious attempt to overcome neoliberalism as such, using the term. Yeah, they definitely considered themselves to be post-neoliberal in some way. They did, which is surprising. First of all, one didn't expect that coming from Biden. But his cabinet and his internal advisory staff kind of got a form of entryism happen from the progressive think tanks. And suddenly, these were the people kind of running things. There was enough consistency from Lighthizer's approach to trade to
Catherine ties that I don't think too much had to change, actually. In fact, a lot accelerated. Yeah. I mean, he famously kept all of the China tariffs that Janet Yellen had said were a terrible idea. Right. And then he makes her Treasury Secretary and they just stay. She lives with them. Yeah. No, and she actually legitimizes them and justifies them. So I think that the internal project of Bidenomics is
was actually very much counter to what I'm describing. I think that they intended to do something very different. They were, I think, trying to do economic nationalism in a more broad-based sense than just using tariffs to funnel investment to clients in the low-tax states, which I think is basically what
The new guys are doing. Why they were unable to succeed is another question, right? Was it contingent? Was inflation actually being accelerated by this level of spending? I don't know. What we do know is they had internal resistance from the kind of summers is, but also the mansions and the cinemas, which put the brakes on a truly...
transformative agenda. And also arguably they didn't have enough time for what they hoped for, which was like this virtuous cycle of investing in de-industrialized areas, producing new workers slash democratic voters who would then become the shock troops for a wonderful Bidenomic future. But I think that it was a project that was moving at cross purposes actually to the mainline trends of
what I described since the end of the Cold War. Yeah. And those friends, I mean, I have to sort of briefly plug my own COVID book here. I do think that a lot of what we were seeing in terms of the sort of fragmentation and deglobalization and even the rise of individual autocrats can be traced in various ways back to the pandemic.
A lot of international barriers went up overnight. Even intranational barriers went up overnight. And a bunch of autocratic impulses were rewarded from China to Vietnam to New Zealand to Portugal. You could see people saying, oh, yeah, actually, I can see why.
having one person in charge making all the decisions kind of makes sense in the context of you need to get everyone doing the same thing in order to bend the curve or whatever yeah i mean i think that it's one of those things that i've talked about this recently but i think you know during in 2020 if we were all doing these conversations and writing op-eds everyone was like politics are going to transform overnight nothing will be the same again and then when things kind of
didn't transform that radically overnight. Everyone made the opposite choice to say that like, no, nothing changed. Actually, there was no effect of COVID. But actually, the answer, I think, is somewhere between. And it
Interestingly, for this conversation we're having, I think there were energies that were produced in both directions. I think that COVID, on the one hand, did produce a sense of social collective sacrifice and solidarity even and a willingness to accede to an enlightened spirit.
scientist government coalition to do things that preserved our common well-being and chances of survival that were obviously very inspiring to people who then said, why don't we now turn this towards a Green New Deal instead of just containing the pandemic?
But at the same time, as you say, it had also fragmenting effects. And the fact that you had like a New England compact of states here and a compact of states in the Southeast that were suddenly sort of preventing free movement by their own citizens and hoarding PPE was to the kind of crack up capitalists like Balaji Srinivasan was very inspiring too, because they're like, wow, look,
look how fragile actually the connective tissue of a nation is. Like this could mean things can change overnight. We just need a sharp, one sharp hit. And the whole thing is brittle enough that it can just fracture. And opportunities for exit have now been accelerated. So I think both projects were given like hope and kind of, you know, energy and octane through COVID. And right now, obviously one rather than the other is winning.
So Balaji was right, basically. The United States is quite brittle, and you can come in with a mallet, a Trump-shaped mallet, hit it in a strategic place, and it will fracture into a million sort of micro-capitalist utopias. Yeah, I mean, I think the reason why it makes sense to follow the rantings and ravings of someone like him or Elon Musk is...
because, you know, they've managed to see the wave, obviously, and ride it in ways that have been, you know, correct in their own terms of enrichment. So they must see some kind of tendency. It might not be a tendency we like, or people on the left might like, but often it's a kind of a sober realization that maybe it's good to come to. And I think
What you're describing, the idea of every person as a kind of a contractor unplugged from any shared bonds around face-to-face community, trade unions, PTA meetings, all of these traditional ideas of civil society in America. Well, yeah, they saw that was happening. They helped accelerate it through the
kind of projects that they were investing in. And so it was a bit of a self-actualizing project. And I just think those two spirits are always kind of at battle with each other in the United States. And it's not foreordained that one side wins rather than the other. But what's interesting right now, I think, is that the ascendant project of the right is
is this one that sort of imagines using centralized state power, not as an end in itself, but as a tool to, I think, accelerate and further the sort of individualization and fragmentation that we've been talking about.
On which note, Quinn Slobodian, thank you so much for coming on Money Talks. I feel like I'm going to be having nightmares for the next four years about this. But I do think that you've done a magnificent job of contextualizing this for us and throwing it into extremely stark relief. Well, the good thing about nightmares is you wake up eventually. There you go. It'll all be fine in the morning.
So thanks very much, Quinn Slobodian, for coming on this week. Thanks to Jessamyn Molly for producing. And we will be back on Saturday with a regular Slate Money.
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