There's a lot of weirdness in Trumpistan. This is an inevitable byproduct of populism, which is driven by feelings of inadequacy in a culture that centers on expertise. Elite expertise - even ostensibly benign expertise like medical experts - is suspect because it comes from "elites".
The most obvious example of this is, of course, RFK Jr's crazy ass shit. This is part of the strange "wellness culture" that exists around sundry forms of quackery. Almost all of these are various forms of fraud or ignorance, though there is some evidence around what could be called non-western medicine. What's more, people feel unhealthy because as you get older your body starts to decline. It's called aging and people are scared to death of it. The idea that there is some secret sauce to keep you young and healthy is very appealing and people will divorce themselves from reason in its pursuit.
Ironically, "Big Pharma" might have unlocked a true "miracle" with these semaglutide medicines like Ozempic. This has led to an online backlash because taking a pill that gives you all sorts of health benefits - weight loss, diabetes, addiction - is "cheating" instead of eating a bonkers diet and chopping four cords of wood every day or whatever nonsense these nutballs come up with.
The implications for public health from RFK and his crew of loons are real. People will die needless if he really starts attacking vaccine mandates. Children, children will die. However, there are other forms of weirdo nonsense that imperil us for the next four years.
I remain convinced that we will have a Crypto bubble before 2028. Crypto is a perfect example of broligarchic, glibertarian nonsense. Money has more or less always been a product and function of the state. Coins bore the heads of caesars, kings and emperors. The ability to manage one's currency is fundamental to modern economics. Crypto is an attack on this function and posits that removing this from the realm of the state will...something? Freedom? Freedumb?
Basically, Crypto is the perfect bubble asset, as it is based on nothing but the agreed on value of it. While Crypto-Bros would argue the same is true of a fiat currency, that ignore the extraordinary wealth and power of even the weaker states.
My fundamental rule for economics is that anyone who says "This time will be different" is a fool, and we know what happens to a fool and their money. Pouring wealth into the random asset of Crypto will grow a bubble - it's inevitable. We've already seen one Crypto bubble, and when the next one bursts, it will take down bigger financial institutions.
Then there is AI. This is less Populist weirdness and more Tech-Bro, but we are moving headlong towards a technology that has the potential to destroy large segments of the economy. If we really do deport millions of people, people like Musk will try and replace them with robots.
What could possibly go wrong?
At the root of this populist moment around the world is the access people now have to all sorts of knowledge, but they have access to it without wisdom or context. Also at its roots is the broad dissatisfaction with the world.
My own theory is that life has literally never been easier, and we simply aren't wired for that. Our brains - wired for threats and deprivation - are running underloaded and hot. We see peril where it doesn't exist, because we are wired to look for it. This accounts for our Anxious Age, and in this time of societal anxiety, we look for solace in certitude. The problem is, actual science is uncertain - that's what makes it science. Doubt, revision, challenging...all of those are essential to intellectual growth.
Populism replaces that skepticism with ferocious certainty. Trump is both profoundly ignorant and profoundly confident. A man those close to him have described as an idiot projects brilliance to a people who saw him on their TeeVee play a savvy business man.
Populist moments in history tend to fade, because they tend to fail. The American Populist movement of farmers in the late 19th century gave birth to a Progressive movement that centered technocratic governance.
While history does not strictly repeat itself, we can hope that it once again rhymes.
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