Michael Hudson makes a few errors here: He clearly misunderstands the nature of American centralization since the 1970s and he conflates technocratic oligarchy with autonomous statecraft. In the real world, US governance today is controlled by a deeply centralized but privately co-dominated architecture that in some ways resembles a slightly evolved but culturally heavily modified version of some of the twentieth century corporatist states, both major parties, neither of which have for a long time been either lower case "r" republican parties or lower case "d" democratic parties, often just serve the interests of a narrow class of financial, corporate, governmental, and in-betweens (eg NGOS, prestige Universities, etc) elites, but within an institutional context that is not the same as the decentralized US Old Republic, but instead it was built post WW2 and accelerated through neoliberal consolidation beginning in the 1970s. The decision to use sanctions, redirect industrial policy, or even expand deficits via tax breaks and defense contracts isnt just a function of Trump or Biden, but the result of an elite-directed governance structure with minimal democratic input and with very different constraints from those that existed under the decentralized, competitive, and publicly accountable economic federalism of the 19th century.
And Hudson dramatically overstates the coherence and control of US policy when he treats military expansion, economic sanctions, and dollar reserve shifts as parts of a coherent class war by “Trump and his cabinet.”: the USA's deeply centralized governance, unlike in the decentralized Neoliberal Era eras, now facilitates elite rule not through overt party machinations, but through institutionalized networks that have heavy insulation from democratic processes, enabled by financial centralization (eg repeal of interstate capital flow inhibitors, effective elimination of the multi class banking system, etc), legal harmonization (eg Commerce Clause expansion, translate elite networking, and many other things), and administrative centralism (eg, preemptions like Section 43201, and many other things). The so-called class war isn’t Trump’s alone, it’s a structural effect of a centralized economic and political regime that both parties operate within. While Hudson correctly and eloquently critiques the upward transfer of wealth, he overlooks how decentralized governance once constrained such extraction by the empowerment of regions and localities combined with limited but actually existing democratic governance structures allowed the general population limited but still substantial ability tto set financial standards, labor laws, and pursue differentiated industrial paths. Without acknowledging that historical reality, his claims lack seriousness.
Michael Hudson makes a few errors here: He clearly misunderstands the nature of American centralization since the 1970s and he conflates technocratic oligarchy with autonomous statecraft. In the real world, US governance today is controlled by a deeply centralized but privately co-dominated architecture that in some ways resembles a slightly evolved but culturally heavily modified version of some of the twentieth century corporatist states, both major parties, neither of which have for a long time been either lower case "r" republican parties or lower case "d" democratic parties, often just serve the interests of a narrow class of financial, corporate, governmental, and in-betweens (eg NGOS, prestige Universities, etc) elites, but within an institutional context that is not the same as the decentralized US Old Republic, but instead it was built post WW2 and accelerated through neoliberal consolidation beginning in the 1970s. The decision to use sanctions, redirect industrial policy, or even expand deficits via tax breaks and defense contracts isnt just a function of Trump or Biden, but the result of an elite-directed governance structure with minimal democratic input and with very different constraints from those that existed under the decentralized, competitive, and publicly accountable economic federalism of the 19th century.
And Hudson dramatically overstates the coherence and control of US policy when he treats military expansion, economic sanctions, and dollar reserve shifts as parts of a coherent class war by “Trump and his cabinet.”: the USA's deeply centralized governance, unlike in the decentralized Neoliberal Era eras, now facilitates elite rule not through overt party machinations, but through institutionalized networks that have heavy insulation from democratic processes, enabled by financial centralization (eg repeal of interstate capital flow inhibitors, effective elimination of the multi class banking system, etc), legal harmonization (eg Commerce Clause expansion, translate elite networking, and many other things), and administrative centralism (eg, preemptions like Section 43201, and many other things). The so-called class war isn’t Trump’s alone, it’s a structural effect of a centralized economic and political regime that both parties operate within. While Hudson correctly and eloquently critiques the upward transfer of wealth, he overlooks how decentralized governance once constrained such extraction by the empowerment of regions and localities combined with limited but actually existing democratic governance structures allowed the general population limited but still substantial ability tto set financial standards, labor laws, and pursue differentiated industrial paths. Without acknowledging that historical reality, his claims lack seriousness.