Populism As Moral and Intellectual Rot

The Trump administration does not have much in the way of coherent ideology. Trump is not principled and goes along consistently with whatever the people who flatter him say. This is why, despite ostensible concerns about AI taking American jobs and long-standing opposition to China, he approved Nvidia chip sales to China. The whole world knows this fact, which is why world leaders like Putin and Zelenskyy make sure to flatter him non-stop, and Qatar was so brazen as to give him a jet.

But insofar as there is any ideology behind Trumpism, it is populism. Trump’s opposition to immigration, foreign aid, and trade are motivated by the same core worldview: America is getting ripped off by other countries, and this is the cause of most of our problems. As a result, we should seek to cut ties with other countries to whatever extent possible, being especially keen to stop doing whatever benefits other countries.

This worldview is almost a pure inversion of mine. I think it is demonstrably wrong on every front. America’s problems are mostly the result of bad institutions. To the extent anyone is doing the ripping off, it is us. It is also immoral. The richest country in the world has an obligation to try to improve things in other countries. Even if foreign aid made us slightly worse off—which I don’t think it does—if it prevented lots of people from dying unnecessarily, it would be worth keeping around.

I find there to be something extremely grotesque about the populist moral worldview in that it seems to take as a given that the interests of people in other countries count for nothing. People like Vance and Walsh repeatedly say that America’s sole focus should be helping America. But why would this be? If a foreign child was drowning in a pond, would we have no duty to pull him out because he was not American? Perhaps we have somewhat greater obligation to help Americans than foreigners, but is helping foreigners really the source of no moral reasons at all? None?

Was the only reason to intervene in world war two for our own benefit? Was the fact that it prevented the massacre of millions of extra Jews no consideration at all, so long as they weren’t American? Would it have been wrong to intervene to stop the genocide in Rwanda—to prevent teenagers from being ...