My last essay: Only Trump Can Solve This

A system that's truly broken cannot simply be tweaked. It must be repaired.

This will be my last essay from Substack. Starting Thursday, I will be sending the essays from a different service, so keep an eye on your inbox. Moving everyone over is a 3-week process. If you don’t hear from me for a while, don’t worry. I’ll get to you!

We are in a situation, as a country, and I think largely as the West generally, that only Trump can solve.

Now, I don’t mean specifically Donald J. Trump. I mean specifically a person who understands power in the same way Donald Trump understands power. He understands that the executive branch is enormous, that it works for the president, and that when all of that power is pointed toward a purpose it can push through a hell of a lot of blockades. Treasury, Labor, Commerce, Energy, Transportation, federal procurement, federal credit, federal land, regulatory agencies, it’s all power. A president can treat that machinery as something to politely administer, or decide the country needs to go somewhere and put it to work getting there.

Trump has done the second thing. He has pushed presidential authority on tariffs, executive control over the government, elections, executive orders, independent agencies and the courts. When one route gets blocked, he looks for another. His sweeping emergency tariffs were struck down, so the administration moved to other existing tariff authorities. His administration has tried to use federal power to change the rules around mail voting and has pushed a broad version of the unitary executive, the idea that a president elected to carry out a program must be able to control the executive branch charged with carrying it out. You can argue about the legality of any particular move, and the courts obviously have. The thing I am interested in is that he understands where the power is and is willing to use it.

The Democrats largely recoil from this idea. Part of that is their commitment to neoliberalism, and part of it is what I consider a perverted view of liberalism generally. There is this idea that the president should manage the government, send some proposals to Congress, wait for the courts, respect every inherited norm, avoid picking too many fights and explain to everybody that change takes time.

One of the most successful Democratic presidents in American history rejected that notion.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood power. He understood that the country had elected him to do something and that doing something meant fighting people who didn’t want it done. He named financial monopoly, reckless banking and organized money as enemies. He welcomed their hatred. He even went after incumbent Democrats who were standing in the way of the New Deal. His 1938 effort to knock off conservative Democrats mostly failed, but the important thing is that he tried. He wasn’t a “blue no matter who” president.

Roosevelt also understood something about checks and balances that party leaders ignore. Checks and balances are not just something that exists inside the government. There has to be a balance of power between markets, corporations, financial institutions and people. If, as they have now, corporations and the ultra wealthy have enough economic power, they can manage our lives without ever passing a law. Prices can control where we live. Employers control our healthcare options. Banks decide who gets credit. Utilities decide what electricity costs. A handful of companies control supply, wages, access and entire markets.

The only entity capable of balancing power away from the ultra wealthy and back toward ordinary people is us through our government. Roosevelt knew that market intervention was required, that the existing stranglehold of private power would prevent us from building the country we needed.

So he put the government to work producing.

The federal government directly hired people. It directly built things. It financed factories, built dams, generated electricity, expanded electric transmission, built public housing, roads, schools, parks and public buildings, financed rural electrification and created institutions that did not exist before. When millions of people needed work, programs like the WPA and CCC didn’t use tax credits or incentives to encourage private companies to do the work. The government hired them and put them to work building things the country needed.

TVA is probably the cleanest example. The government did not ask private utilities to please make electricity cheaper and more available across the Tennessee Valley. It built dams, generated power and created a public power system capable of transforming an entire region. That same capacity later helped power wartime industry and the Manhattan Project.

Then the war came and this way of thinking went into overdrive. The production requirements were absurd. We needed more planes, ships, tanks, trucks, engines, aluminum, rubber and ammunition than the existing industrial system could possibly produce. If Roosevelt had accepted the normal assumptions about how long factories took to build and how slowly markets adjusted, the answer would have been that it couldn’t be done. Europe would have lost the war.

Luckily for us FDR didn’t accept that answer.

Big Bill Knudsen, the former president of General Motors, became one of the people Roosevelt put to work organizing production. The government financed factories, built factories, owned factories, paid private companies to operate factories, allocated scarce materials, guaranteed demand and forced production priorities toward the things the country needed. The Detroit Arsenal is a perfect example. We needed tanks, so the government financed and built a giant tank plant and had Chrysler operate it. The point was not ideological purity about who owned what. We needed the factory, so we built the factory.

That is the part people leave out when they talk about American capitalism winning the war. The market didn’t wake up one morning, notice a profitable opportunity to defeat Hitler and organically produce the arsenal of democracy. The government decided what had to exist and then organized the public and private capacity needed to make it exist.

We did the same thing over and over again. We produced enough material to equip ourselves and supply the Allies. We built enough industrial capacity that after the war the United States could help rebuild Europe, build huge amounts of housing and infrastructure, expand electricity and create the material abundance people now look back on as if it somehow appeared naturally.

Donald Trump understands the power part. His problem is purpose.

He can point the executive branch toward immigrants, DEI, universities, the radical left, bureaucrats he considers disloyal, mail voting, allies, or whatever enemy is useful that week, and even if he defeated every one of them tomorrow, their houses would still cost too much, their healthcare would still cost too much, their electric bill would still be too high, childcare would still be too expensive, their town would still have too few doctors, their roads and bridges would still need work, their kids would still be wondering how the hell they are going to afford a house, and the country would still not have enough manufacturing capacity to make many of the things we depend on.

Roosevelt pointed power toward production. Electricity, jobs, housing, infrastructure, finance, labor power, factories, industrial capacity. If private capital would not build what was needed, government could build it. If private finance wouldn’t finance it, government would. If people needed jobs, government could hire them. If private utilities wouldn’t electrify poor communities at an affordable price, public power did.

This is the part modern Democrats seem determined to forget. They love storytelling. They love talking about fairness, dignity, community and opportunity. They seem much less interested in the fact that Roosevelt’s politics were believable because something existed underneath the story. People could see the dam. They could see the electric line. They could see the road. They could see the factory being built and their neighbor going to work.

The story worked because it was attached to a vision, a bold vision, and then that vision was attached to doing.

That is also what people misunderstand about vision. A vision does not become believable because it is small. Getting to the moon was ridiculous. Rebuilding the industrial base? Providing healthcare to every American? Building enough housing to make it affordable? Training hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, engineers, machinists and tradespeople? All quite ridiculous.

Until we start doing it.

If you say you are going to the moon and then build the rockets, launch facilities, factories, training programs and engineering teams, and start blowing shit up in Florida, people begin to believe you might actually be going to the moon.

The thing I hear over and over whenever we talk about rebuilding the country is that it takes time. Of course it takes time. A factory takes time to build. A doctor takes time to train. A power plant takes time to construct. The decision to start takes time. Starting doesn’t. The fact that a project takes six years to finish can’t require ten years of debate before the first shovel goes into the ground.

The executive branch is enormous, and when it is wielded toward a purpose it can coordinate agencies, use federal purchasing to create markets, use federal credit to finance capacity, use procurement to change what gets produced, direct departments to use old authorities in new ways, and force Congress and the courts to respond to a government that is already moving instead of spending years asking permission to imagine moving.

Trump understands that. Roosevelt understood it too.

The difference that matters is what the power is for.

If we want people to believe democratic government can solve their problems, democratic government is going to have to solve some fucking problems. It is going to have to build things again, produce things again, hire people, generate electricity, build transmission, build housing, expand medical capacity, build factories and create enough material abundance that ordinary people can see their lives getting better.

Then we can tell the story.

It’s time we find a president ready and willing to use executive power to build a better America, not a bigger ballroom.