AP PHOTO
The coronavirus pandemic led to the largest economic shock that modern China has suffered.
An abridged version of this interview appears in the September/October 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Adam Tooze is everywhere these days. The Columbia University professor of history is a constant presence on Twitter, published in an array of publications on both sides of the Atlantic, and a frequent guest on podcasts from Bloomberg’s Odd Lots to Jacobin’s The Dig.
But Tooze is principally known for his nightstand-crushing histories based on primary documents and years of research, like 2006’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy and 2018’s Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. Perhaps reflecting his recent interest in the day-to-day, his newest work breaks with this habit. Instead, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy is a history of last year. Tooze studies how the pandemic and government responses to it played out in China, the United States, the European Union, and the rest of the world.
Tooze carefully chose the title—he did not call it Lockdown, because the economy began shuddering to a halt before policymakers acted—and he emphasizes repeatedly how unprecedented so many things were in 2020. There had never been anything like the near-universal halt to economic activity last spring, no comparably rapid spike in unemployment, and nothing like the massive economic supports put in place by world governments.
The American Prospect talked with Tooze about the fiscal responses around the world, the Chinese state’s epic capacity for risk management, and the role of central banks in economic management. An edited transcript follows.
We’ve had pandemics before, but we’ve never had this kind of voluntary shutdown and accompanying economic contraction before. We’ve also never had fiscal support of this magnitude before. What changed between, say, 1918 and 2020, not just in the U.S. and Europe, but all over the world, that allowed for this kind of world-historic response?
As a first approximation, I picked up on Martin Wolf’s answer, which is that this is something that rich countries do. It’s a choice to afford ourselves this generous and gigantic response. That’s true up to a point, except that what makes 2020 so truly unique is that at least in March and April, the lockdown response was global. It wasn’t confined to rich countries. The even more remarkable effort is made by places like India or South Africa.
The most specific thing you could say is that the epidemiological transition remains the horizon towards which we are all moving. We moved in the late ’60s and early ’70s into an era in which the promise that people would be safe from infectious disease became the global standard. Not everyone actually attains it, but a standard of development shared across the world is that you should achieve that. This is true in the West. It’s true in the Communist countries of the world—at the time, a very large part of humanity. There’s this specific logic of defining the epidemiological transition as a horizon of expectation for everybody, a bit like assuming that everyone should be able to read and write. That wasn’t true at all, in most societies, until the early 20th century. It’s now not even negotiable. It’s not true, of course, that all societies—Afghanistan being a notable case—attain universal literacy. But the epidemiological transition is a bit like that.
That then speaks to a third element of the story, which has a similar chronology, which is about human rights. There’s the sense in which no government anywhere in the world can say life is cheap. When the epidemiologists ran their models, the results were simply incompatible with some basic assumptions about how societies needed to be governed. That’s what 2020 tells us. This doesn’t mean of course, in practice, that we do everything we possibly can to sustain life for most people at the highest level over time. We don’t. But when you’re faced with a shock, and you are actually asked publicly to answer the questions: Does everyone’s life count? And are you therefore responsible for doing something about it? The only viable answer you can give is yes, I must do something, of course we must. That’s what explains that reaction.
The fact that it’s difficult to uphold, and in practice we regularly sacrifice lives in various ways to save money, explains the haphazard nature from May, June, July, as that consensus breaks down. But for a brief period of time, those norms become dominant. Everyone’s life counts. People should specifically not die of infectious diseases, and we can afford it.
Your book is divided between the U.S., the U.K., and the EU, China, and the rest of the world. Let’s start where the pandemic appears to have started. Western pundits were saying this could be the Chinese Communists’ Chernobyl moment. That’s not what happened. How did COVID highlight the strengths and the weaknesses of the Chinese state?
I would not go too far in saying that the failure itself highlighted specific weaknesses of the Chinese state. The first thing you have to realize about China is it’s just absolutely gigantic. Hubei province is the size of the largest European nation-state (only Germany has a significantly higher population). The Chinese try and operate a reporting system in which diseases across this giant country are reported upwards in a linear fashion towards an agency in Beijing. There is a command-and-control system with considerable sanctions if you screw up. That a system like that should not work well is perhaps indicative of the weaknesses of Chinese governance, the difficulty within an authoritarian regime of admitting mistakes and so on. But I’m not at all confident that if the disease had broken out somewhere in the West that it would have percolated upwards to the global health agencies much more quickly than it did. After all, we’re talking about a time lag of, defenders of China would say, a matter of weeks. But even if you admitted that the disease began to circulate quite rapidly in late November, early December, we are talking about six weeks perhaps. If a disease had broken out in the Czech Republic or Brazil, I’m not too confident it would have made its way up to the global attention more quickly than that.
But it certainly did fail. The Chinese regime had made a promise to itself and its population that SARS would not happen again. This is a promise that the regime takes extremely seriously because 2003 was a huge shock. There’s no question at all that the inner-party politics of the CCP and the behavior of the administrators in Wuhan and then Hubei blocked that system and led to this disaster. If the West had promptly learned the lessons from China in February and taken actions accordingly, this could have been the Chernobyl of the Chinese regime. This could have been the SARS moment, but much, much worse.
It should have been a crippling blow to the regime’s authority. This is the largest economic shock that the country has suffered. It was clearly the responsibility of local party officials and there maybe was a matter of delay in Beijing too. All of this adds up to a very considerable failure on the regime’s part. But they must have just watched with amazement at what then proceeded to happen in the rest of the world. It’s staggering. It flips from being something that was a very profound shock to the regime to being a spectacular propaganda coup.
Why did the Chinese state, in its efforts to counterbalance the economic effects of COVID, not focus much on individual supports for income or employment? You would think a communist state might support workers first.
It’s a deep bias in the Chinese state apparatus. It’s a clear weakness in their ability to manage both society and economic stresses going forward. The default mode for stimulus in China is to channel money through the credit system to the big corporations. That gets your investment function going, that gets your infrastructure-building going. That cranks up the heavy industrial complex, which is what we see in the second half of 2020. They do not have the welfare state mechanisms in place. Quite contrary to what you would expect, the benefits of the prosperity of the last 30 to 40 years in China have not exactly trickled down, they have rained down on the population through the market mechanism—not through an extraordinarily generous welfare state. After 2008, they did roll out a major health care reform, but there hasn’t been anything like that this time around.
I read recently that the party these days is less a party of workers and peasants and more one of business owners and upper-middle-class professionals.
It’s fair to say it’s tilted that way relative to where it was before, but it still remains a party with a considerable representation of workers and peasants—to a much higher degree than political parties in the West. But absolutely, the party is increasingly a meritocratic system. It’s also heavily selected amongst university students. The better-educated, younger generations of Chinese are desperate to get state jobs because they see the future under Xi as being centered on government. You’re much less likely to find yourself accused of corruption or malpractice if you’re in the public sector. In the early 2000s, there was a very heavy effort to recruit the business elite into the party. That’s changing before our eyes as we see the CCP crack down on big-business actors. One of the really striking things that happened in 2020 is that the attack on Jack Ma began in the late summer of last year, and has continued ever since.
This goes to some of the strengths of the regime that are worth elaborating on. The Chinese Communist Party has systematically built a new committee structure and membership structure in the new China that has come into existence in the last 20 years. They colonized co-op boards. If you live in one of the fancy new apartment buildings in Beijing or Shanghai or one of the major regional cities, your condo complex owners committee has several members of the party represented on it. When it came to organizing collective lockdowns, of entire housing projects private or public, the party could become very directly involved in those. They have an infrastructure of cooperative committees, which they’ve been very deliberately fostering.
The point I’m trying to make is it’s not simply recruiting the very top of society, so much as recruiting the new educated middle and upper middle class into the ranks of the party. They mobilized that to an extraordinary extent in February, hundreds of thousands of people in each of the major provinces recruited to these essentially disciplinary committees that were overseeing the lockdown in each area. But this doesn’t translate into a super-generous welfare program. That’s what we saw in the West.
Courtesy of Adam Tooze
Adam Tooze
Despite the early errors of the Chinese leadership, 2020 can be seen as further evidence of an aggressive ability to manage risk that is unparalleled in the West. During the pandemic too, Xi Jinping announced that he would make the country carbon-neutral by 2060. Given the state of politics in the U.S., does that mean that in the fight against climate change China could be a more reliable ally than America?
America has zero credibility on the climate issue. I mean that in the technical sense: There’s no way in which any interpreter of the American situation could conclude that there was a stable coalition of interests in the United States that would make you believe that any entirely sincere promise made by the Biden administration would stick. The Biden administration will not be able to persuade anyone that any commitment that it makes will stick simply because of the structure of American politics right now and the attitude of the GOP on this issue.
America is not a credible partner; whether China is remains to be seen. I’m amongst those who interpret Xi’s move as very important. China is not just more credible than the United States, but it is the problem. China is 28 percent of the global emissions problem, and America’s share is closer to 14 percent and falling. So China’s actions really dictate the entire climate political scene and I think the West is only slowly waking up to the significance of this. We’re still caught in a guilt trip of the 1990s where we are the major emitters and we have the largest historical responsibility. The situation that we’re in now is, regardless of what we do about it, the decision is going to be made in Beijing, and then subsequently, in other large Asian capitals. Furthermore, the impact of climate change will be felt far and away more intensely there than in the West.
The problem has moved from being something the West recognized, and then, more or less inadequately, took responsibility for to being above all Asia’s problem to fix. The question really is how far can Beijing percolate that understanding down? China is incomprehensibly huge as a polity, by our standards, and it has politics too. It’s incredibly difficult for Beijing to corral the heavy industrial coal interests on the line that it clearly wants to go down. Xi Jinping making an announcement like that has to be taken more seriously than the equivalent announcement by a democratic politician. Not because he doesn’t engage in propaganda, or he isn’t manipulative, but because his word is law in a way that is not true for anyone in the West. His words will become operative tokens in the game played within the Chinese bureaucracy. “Because Chairman Xi said this we must x” is an argument. That’s just not true in the West.
But that has to be pushed through against the resistance of the largest coal sector in the world. There’s nothing in the West equivalent to the giant power complex the Chinese have built. And the increasing tension with the West on security issues makes China more disposed to lurch back into dependence on that, because they can mine the coal domestically and other sources of energy are imported. Moving from coal to gas is not very attractive. You could make a national-security case for the shift to renewables, but in the short run that’s difficult to organize.
Broadly speaking, the Europeans were clearly treating China as a more cooperative, more significant, and more credible partner in the climate enterprise than they were the United States in 2020. China has modeled its carbon pricing model on that of Europe. There is direct dialogue between the two parties about that kind of governance mechanism. The Chinese agree that carbon pricing is the way to go. The development of the Chinese solar industry was driven by the European subsidy system the Germans introduced in the early 2000s. That’s what propelled the growth of the Chinese solar sector. In the EV [electric vehicle] space, VW’s entire strategy for shifting to EV hinges on its cooperation with Chinese partners. On that level of industrial policy, China is already seen by the key players outside the United States as the partner to work with. Or at least it was until the current extraordinary deterioration in relations between China and the West.
The default mode for stimulus in China is to channel money through the credit system to the big corporations.
Let’s pivot to Europe, and pick up where your last book left off. Italy and Spain were hit hardest by the pandemic and were also among the European nations hit hardest after 2008. You note that Italy’s GDP was 10 percent lower in 2020 than it was in 2008. How did that earlier crisis set them up to face the pressures of 2020 and 2021?
The hospitals are the front line of the system and it prejudiced their ability to cope with the crisis quite severely, because their health systems in both cases had been operating under very tight budgets for the last ten years. Whether that was a critical difference is not plausible to argue because once an exponentially growing pandemic gets out of control there’s no pre-existing level of hospital capacity that will save you. But it certainly didn’t help.
The issue that was most pressing was the debt level. The concern was that the elevated debt levels, notably of the Italians, would crimp their ability to respond adequately in terms of fiscal policy to the crisis. Those were the stakes of the extraordinary argument that went on between March and June, when the future of Europe was in the balance. I’ve not witnessed anything like the level of anxiety and fear in Europe in April since, well, I wasn’t in touch with decision-makers in 2011, but writing about that period, the stress was reminiscent of that. Things were on a knife’s edge. If that had persisted, it would have been disastrous for the ability of the weaker eurozone countries to mount an effective fiscal policy response.
As then, there was the change in attitude of the EU towards a common fiscal response, and the uninhibited support given by the ECB. The combination of those two things, the prospect of a long-term fiscal deal, and the immediate support by the ECB really changes the game for Italy and Spain.
The Next Generation EU fund showed that the European Union could finally muster some countercyclical fiscal ability. How did that program measure up to those in the other wealthy nations and what do its limits augur for the future of the European project?
It would be churlish to insist that the Next Gen EU package did not signify a very considerable break. You won’t find many people in any camp in European politics arguing that. It clearly constituted a major step forward. It isn’t a stimulus package, it’s more like Biden’s infrastructure plan, so comparing it to the giant stimulus packages the Americans did is completely unfair.
It’s an infrastructure program focused on green and digital to a very high extent, which also makes it different from the stimulus packages of most countries. It’s not gigantic, but it’s quite significant from the point of view of the nation-states which received most of it. The East European states in particular receive large allocations, but even in Italy the scale of spending relative to one year of GDP is very considerable. It will make a difference to national investment rates in the public sector. In that sense, one shouldn’t confuse it with the national programs, which were immediate crisis-fighting programs supported by the ECB. That innovation is as important as anything else. The fact that Italy and Greece can now borrow short, medium term at negative interest rates is an effect of the interventions by the ECB.
You can’t see one element without the other. All together it’s quite impressive, the national-level packages, the longer-term infrastructure package with its eye on the climate problem, and the whole thing backed up by the ECB. You can see why people are enthusiastic. It’s as though the Biden infrastructure program was brought forward to the summer of 2020 and had been negotiated in a bipartisan way with every single state of the United States. It isn’t big enough, in relation to the recovery needs of the European economy. It’s not big enough in relation to the overall needs of the climate problem. But it’s a work in progress.
The really big question, and the big qualification is, what will its meaning be for the future? Is this package a precedent for future progress? Or is it an exceptional measure? Depending on who you talk to in Europe, it’s unclear which one it is. This is a question to be decided, and one of the places it will be decided is in the German election, which is happening now.
It’s like how our interpretation of what’s happening in the United States is overshadowed by our expectations for the midterms. Is this going to be a two-year presidency, a nine-month window of activism? Or is this going to be a historic break? The same is true in Europe and the question is undecided. Which coalition emerges as dominant in Germany in September will, to a large extent, condition the meaning of what happened in 2020. This is the nature of this kind of historic change. It doesn’t announce itself at the beginning when it’s initiated. But it’s certainly promising, it’s radical, it’s new, it’s unprecedented, and it’s so much quicker. The crisis strikes in March and they’ve done the deal in outline by June. That’s a totally different timeline from what we saw in the eurozone crisis.
You argue the fiscal interventions of the pandemic were essentially conservative, in the Bismarckian sense, preserving the social order through the welfare state. But there was really substantial new ground broken: sending money to people no strings attached, making unemployment compensation actually livable, and child subsidy payments. We are seeing politicians in both parties embracing redistributive or welfare policies that would have been radical even ten years ago. That seems like a fundamental shift.
I would agree, and I think there’s an element of learning here. The package had to be more equitable than it was in 2008–2009. This is particularly true of the American Rescue Plan, the package passed by the Congress under the Biden administration, which was very well targeted at middle- and low-income families and has relatively little pork and few tax giveaways.
We should distinguish between innovative measures, which have a significant effect in alleviating the suffering and uncertainty suffered by the most vulnerable Americans and anything you could call structural change. The measures taken in America, as enormous as they were, have about them the quality of a sticking plaster. It’s far larger than ever delivered before, but it is not a change in the labor market system, it is not the introduction of a nationwide unemployment insurance system. It’s a very generous add-on provided by Congress and the federal government, but America has to do things like this in crises because the underlying system is so broken.
Where you begin to see a more transformative dimension emerging is in the emphasis of the Biden administration on running the economy hot. That comeback in that famous press conference where Biden is asked what should employers do about the so-called shortage in the labor market. And his response is simply “pay them more.” That is a policy which is potentially transformative in its implications in the long run. The understanding that macroeconomic policy, by shifting the balance of power in the labor market, could shift the terms on which working Americans are paid and gain employment. Over the long run, if it’s sustained—that, of course, is the big if—is potentially transformative. But that’s all still to be decided in the future. The measures that were taken in 2020 were novel, unlike anything we’ve seen before, but they did not transform the social structure in any way. The totality of measures taken, the combination of fiscal policy and monetary policy together, is profoundly conservative in its implications.
It is true that governments around the world gave out money to working families. But it’s also true that they gave out extraordinary handouts to businesses around the world. We have various ways of dressing that up to disguise that fact. We’ve allowed special allowances for small to medium-sized businesses, which is a cuddly way of describing a large part of the most affluent groups in society: the owners of small and medium-sized businesses. The effect absolutely is to underwrite the status quo.
Speaking of the status quo, in the book you repeatedly argue that while big business, Wall Street, and the military did not rally to the Trumpist cause, that wasn’t a hard test of their constitutional credibility. What if the Democrats had nominated Bernie Sanders, and it was his victory being contested in January 2021. How might that have unfolded?
The fact that we’re asking this question at all points to the scale, the depth, and the historical seriousness of the crisis that America experienced last year. The fact that big business had to come out several times and say, we have an interest in American democracy and the rule of law, and it was necessary for the military to make the variety of statements that they did. That points to an extraordinarily serious crisis in governance in the U.S.
How robust are the guardrails to ensure that we didn’t have the truly terrifying outcome we might have had. To test that proposition, you can look at the way in which the key groups behaved at that moment and what arguments they offered for their actions. You could come away impressed that key business groups at various points did express support, but you could also wonder at the way they formulated that. It was very carefully couched in many cases. Business has an interest in preserving civility. Business has an interest in following the rule of law, an interest in functional continuity from one administration to the next. You have a senior executive coming out saying, as the representative of an expense claim transaction processing software I have to say, in the interest of my shareholders, in the event of a civil war fewer expense claims will be filed. That these sorts of things are said with some degree of seriousness could make you feel they could have been stronger. Those are quite cagey, qualified statements.
Are any of us confident that we could have predicted the way those business groups would have expressed their opinion if the candidate in question had been somebody who was a self-declared socialist? What we do know is that when Sanders looked as though he was going to run, there was talk about a third candidate, which would have gone quite a long way to handing the election to Trump. We also have a third part of the circumstantial puzzle: the promises Biden was willing to make to big-business owners and seriously wealthy Americans that there was no reason for them to be panicking. You don’t say that as a politician like Biden unless you fear they might be panicking. That they might be panicking about you, of all people, the senator from Delaware—who presided over one of the most gigantic, tax-evading mechanisms of corporate intransparency in the entire world. This is not a man that you would normally think would need to reassure that kind of donor, but he took time to do so. He very explicitly spelled out his logic that they needed to do some redistribution, but it wouldn’t really hurt. Everyone in the room fully understood that if they didn’t do it, the consequences could be bad. There was talk of revolts and revolutions. Which is what Sanders is from that point of view.
So you highlight throughout the book that the political story of 2020 was essentially one of centrist technocrats versus right-wing populists. The left was politically defeated in the U.K. and in the U.S. The trade union movement continues to be quite weak. There is no substantial talk of revolution. You make a point of saying that there’s no going back to the era of postwar Keynesianism. Do you think it’s nostalgic to yearn for that era of social democracy? Or could that be a real political project to rebuild it?
I do think it’s nostalgic, and I think it’s an encumbrance to being clear about what’s actually happening to spend too much time looking for analogies of that type. It’s a beef I had with the Green New Deal people, though I’m supportive of their project. But in terms of strategic and tactical analysis, it’s crucial to understand where we stand.
The configuration of macroeconomic policy that we saw, namely giant fiscal policy and expansive monetary policy and the appearance of one supporting the other—in other words, central bank backstopping fiscal policy action. We need to understand this Frankenstein quality of the current politics, which is this weird hybrid mixture of giant welfare programs combined with huge support of financial markets and the wealth of the über-elite at the same time, using the same mechanisms. What, in that context, do progressive politics look like?
You can’t rule out the possibility of building new coalitions of organized labor; it’s difficult for me to imagine a move in a positive direction that didn’t involve that. But you’d have to say that it’s a work in progress starting on the basis of very unpropitious circumstances. We live amongst the ruins of that 1940s–1950s model. The Detroit settlement after World War II is no longer available. Detroit is not Detroit anymore. There’s no way back. That’s my basic message.
What’s the basis for mass collective-action type politics under current circumstances? I’m no better placed to answer that than any number of other left-of-center analysts who have broken their teeth on that problem. The type of problem that we face from the Anthropocene isn’t in any obvious sense generative of the kind of historical agent of change, the countervailing force, that organized labor once was. If your struggle is about distribution, and the achievement of rights and recognition for working people, then those working people in their workplaces have a degree of countervailing power. This is the essential truth behind the Marxist, the social democratic, diagnosis. Working people as such, in their places of work, have a countervailing power in regards to the specific problem of social justice and an equitable distribution of rewards. That’s not true with regards to a pandemic, or biodiversity, or the climate problem.
As Andreas Malm, the radical Marxist climate theorist, has said: This is a revolutionary diagnosis without a revolutionary subject. That’s why at the end of my book, I come to what many people on the left may regard as a defeatist conclusion, which is that we have to focus on crisis management. There are certain leaders which give us a degree of agency with regard to these problems. Though they may not satisfy our desire for democratic inclusion, participation, or the sort of mass politics that mark the mid-century moment, they can at least offer us some way of staving off the worst. That’s what we saw last year. That’s what we saw in 2008–2009 as well.
By disposition, by my position in the American education system, by my personal inclinations as a fully paid-up member of the professional managerial class, that’s where my attention is focused. That’s the way in which we can gain leverage on these issues. But our chances of doing so in a progressive direction would be enhanced if we also had what used to be called an extra-parliamentary mobilization of actors representing the working class in its broadest sense. That our leverage would be increased by that is undoubtedly the case. But that’s a different kind of book, a different kind of analytic project, a different kind of politics than the one I personally am involved in. But I see the complementarity between the two things, for sure.
You write that the central bankers seem to be the one area of Western government in which the authorities have begun to grasp the scale of the challenges we face. You also say there appears to be no fundamental macroeconomic limit to what they can do, and that their limits are not financial but political and social. Can you expand on that?
I’m broadly sympathetic to the MMT vision, especially in its classic Keynesian versions. In other words, monetary constraints, budget balances, debt levels really are not a binding constraint on us in the current situation. The binding constraint, the sting at the end of the famous Keynes quote—“We can afford anything we can actually do”—is the “actually doing” bit. The “actually doing” bit involves us organizing ourselves collectively, it involves us organizing technically. Doing things like Operation Warp Speed, and then engineering the contracts in such a way and envisioning the project in such a way as it’s actually capable of delivering a vaccine program, not just for the richest countries in the world but for 7.7 billion people. That’s what we need and without which the delta variant will just be the beginning of an endless series of frustrations.
We have extraordinary agency in one area, which is intimately tied up also with one of the great flywheels of inequality, which is central banks atop the global financial system. There was such a wave of enthusiasm for central-banking action and its potency. I see MMT as the left version of that enthusiasm. But the main constraints are actually the technical, social, political ability to organize ourselves collectively to actually do the things that need doing. If we simply just spin the monetary wheels continuously, we know what happens, we saw it last year, we saw it in the aftermath of 2008. Those with a stake in the apparatus of financial assets benefit massively and large parts of the rest of society, let alone the rest of the world, are left behind.
This is a theme that runs across the whole book. A Brazil can manage its financial problems, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to escape a truly epic pandemic. A Peru can borrow for 100 years at the end of last year, and that’s not going to solve its political problems or the fact that Lima is a pressure cooker of pandemic risk. It turns out that money is not the center of your problems, because that is actually something that can be managed.
If there is no revolutionary or left-wing threat to this technocratic regime, and the trade union movement is still too weak to propel the kind of inflation we saw in the 1970s, is the fundamental threat to the current status quo simply from the populist right? How worried are you about that?
In the United States, I’m extremely worried. The crisis of the American political system is ongoing and could easily tip in a disastrous direction in the midterms next year. Then we would be returning to the kind of maelstrom of dysfunction we saw in 2020. I see that as deeply rooted in the dissociation between the mass base of the GOP, and that includes a large section of what used to be called the petty bourgeoisie small-business owners, the owners of car dealerships and construction firms up and down the country. People who are modestly well-off, do not belong to the elite, but nevertheless have very substantial resources and are aligned with culturally conservative politics. The dissociation between them and the managerial elite, and the owners of really large capital in the United States, and that fissure within the conservative establishment means that the GOP is increasingly a party of affect, a party of cultural reaction driven by those people and their local business interests.
Then you have the very random ad hoc instrumentalization of the Republican Party by particular business interests, with the Koch brothers being a particular case in point. But even they seem to have lost control of the Trump bandwagon. There isn’t any country in the world where this threat is more serious than in the U.S. It’s more deeply entrenched, it goes to the very heart of the political system. Many people would say Bolsonaro is a similar risk, but he doesn’t have anywhere near the kind of political infrastructure that this sort of right-wing politics does in the U.S. As long as that remains the case, what we used to be, the linchpin of the global system, is profoundly fragile.
Americans and the wider world should be profoundly concerned about it. We came very, very close to disaster in the U.S. last year. It’s quite likely that we could slide back into some configuration like that and, well, we’re seeing in places like Texas the potential consequences.
