This is the first post in a series drawn from an essay that I wrote for an anthology/time capsule that Stu Segal is putting together. The topic question for the anthology is “will Trump make America great again?” Stu approached authors who were both pro and con, and I’m decidedly the latter–I even object to the question. But as you’ll see below, I decided to look at the issue through an impersonal (if still mostly contrary) lens.

I’ll be giving you more information about Stu’s project as it becomes available.  In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this series.

INTRODUCTION

I don’t think you want to hear my personal reaction to the new regime. The reasons are obvious: 1) Who the hell cares what I think? I write science fiction, a genre with interesting ideas but by definition removed from our present reality. 2) My antipathy is as common as dirt. It’s shared by many and you can find it (whether you want to or not) in plenty of other venues. You don’t need to go hunting for hostility in a book.

It strikes me though that my problem is analogous to one that Alexis de Tocqueville observed about all citizens in America’s democracy: we are obsessed with our individual opinions even though we are by and large part of an undifferentiated mass.

And there’s my solution: thinking about de Tocqueville reminds me that I studied social theory before turning to fantasy thrillers. I’ll give you what seven classical social theorists said or might have said about American greatness and its relationship to the new regime: Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud. You might not agree with any of them, but their opinions are worth knowing.

I. Adam Smith

In social theory, Adam Smith is our ur-capitalist. Lawmakers used the principles of Smith’s work against the agrarian tariffs for the benefit of the old landed, rent-seeking aristocracy that constrained the new wealth-generating industrial sector. He published The Wealth of Nations the same year as the birth of the United States, uniting it almost mystically with our free market destiny.

So, it’s completely likely that Smith would have found some of America’s greatness in its relatively free markets. He would have approved of America’s post-World War II general policy of encouraging open international trade and its institutions.

But Smith’s Wealth of Nations is best read in conjunction with his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In that work, Smith distinguishes long-term self-interest from short-term selfishness. For Smith, the capitalist conjunction between virtue and self-interest can break down for the rich and powerful who think they are above the law and capitalist imperatives of quality and thus free to indulge their viceful, selfish whims and maintain a large company of flatterers and deceivers. In Wealth of Nations, Smith’s particular example of such a failure to distinguish long-term self-interest from short-term selfishness is the great proprietors of Medieval Europe, who by selling their birth-right “for trinkets and baubles… became insignificant.”[i]

How does the new regime stack up in Smith’s thought? First, it has attacked existing free trade agreements and institutions without any sort of rational backup plan and has threatened the mercantilist tariffs that Smith abhorred. It has also attacked the foreign aid and other forms of soft power that helps encourage free global markets. In general, the regime supports the modern equivalents of landed wealth–oil, mines, real estate–against the generators of new wealth.

Reflecting its own collective personality, the regime has encouraged the forces of short-term selfishness across our government, but perhaps the most noteworthy instances in a Smith-eyed lens are the anti-environmental policies that serve the immediate interests of the modern equivalents of landed wealth to the long-term detriment of our country and the world. Contrary to the popular shallow view of Smith and despite his free market principles, I don’t believe he’d approve of such short-sighted selfishness.

[i] The Wealth of Nations, III, iv, 14.