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Berny Belvedere: Hi, I’m Berny Belvedere for The UnPopulist, and this is Zooming In.
Today, I’m joined by John Cassidy, longtime columnist at The New Yorker who for decades has been writing incisively about the state of the economy.
John is the author of several well-received books. His first examined the dot com bubble and his second the causes of the Great Recession. But our conversation today centers on his third and most recent: Capitalism and Its Critics, A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI. As its title suggests, the book is a dive into the history of capitalism through the eyes of its greatest critics.
The genesis of Capitalism and Its Critics, John explains, was in 2016—when both major parties witnessed the rise of candidates for the presidential nomination who were critics of capitalism, rather than its champions.
On the left, Bernie Sanders, a socialist, harnessed widespread economic discontent into a formidable political operation that nearly denied Hillary Clinton a nomination everyone thought she would easily secure. But the more surprising development was on the right with the rise of Donald Trump in the party that considered itself an opponent of socialism and a champion of markets. His economic populism—an admixture of neo-mercantilism, protectionism, and nativism—repudiated the Republican commitment to free enterprise.
John’s analytical starting point—the remarkable fact that in 2016 two of the three people with the best chance at winning the presidency had significant qualms about market liberalism—thus set up a really fascinating narrative: one that is equal parts about the incredible resilience of capitalism and also the stubborn persistence of some of its greatest critics. John is not a market liberal and there might be things to quibble with in his critique of free-market economics—or neoliberalism as he would call it. But his work offers an exceedingly useful look at the political crises and the disruptive technologies that caused both sides to converge on a critique of capitalism and propelled a populist movement that is rocking the core of our liberal democracy.
Together, John and I explore why the right turned toward economic nationalism, and what his dive into the history of capitalism can tell us about where things might go from here.
We hope you enjoy.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Berny Belvedere: In my journalistically formative years, before I officially joined “the discourse,” your columns were among the sources I’d rely on to get clear on what was happening in the economy. This was around the time when iPads first came out. I would queue up your articles and chase down every term or concept I wanted to know better. I gained a lot from your weekly work at The New Yorker. But I think we would need much more than a single podcast episode to wade through your thinking across the years from your columns.
So I want to focus on your recent book instead. It’s called Capitalism and Its Critics: a History from the Industrial Revolution to AI. And it’s fantastic. Your framing choice—which was to run through the modern history of capitalism by foregrounding the challenges put forth by critics—all by itself makes it a must read. But it’s also an excellent history in its own right. I’ve actually found this “through the lens of critics” frame to be a really helpful one—not just to understand the critics or their alternative proposals, like some of these “people’s history” formulations try to do, but to better understand the ideas that the critics found wanting.
I’ll plug another Zooming In episode that I’ve done. Last year, I talked to Georgetown’s Jerome Copulsky. He had written a book called American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order, and his idea was to profile religious thinkers who are critics, not advocates, of American liberal democracy. What made you interested in bringing in the complaints made by “capitalism’s heretics,” as it were, into your history? Why did the book take the shape that it did? How did the book project come about?
John Cassidy: Good question. And thanks very much for inviting me on. I would say the book came from two things. In the short term, it came from the political situation in 2016, when I first had the idea for the book, when Bernie Sanders was running from the left and Donald Trump was running from the right, both of them offering critiques of capitalism. People have forgotten now that Trump was actually very critical of the structure of the U.S. economy—he attacked big banks, he attacked big corporations for shipping jobs overseas. And Bernie, of course, was providing the left-wing critique. So this seemed to me to be something pretty new in American history: to have major presidential candidates running on critiques of capitalism. And my basic idea was: There must be a book here somewhere. That was short term.
The long term is I’ve always been interested in the history of ideas and economic ideas. My two previous books covered that subject as well. So I started thinking maybe there’s a way to frame this crisis of legitimacy of capitalism, which is how I interpreted the situation in 2016, in terms of historical critiques of the system. I first thought maybe I’ll just go to the end of the Cold War and talk about critiques since then. But then I thought that [will] just be another history of neoliberalism. There’ve been lots of those.
And I kept moving further back. I thought maybe I’ll start after the Second World War—but then you have to explain where Keynesianism came from. Eventually I just wrote a backwards recursion process. I thought: Why not just do it from the start? And where is the start? I mean, I grew up in Northern England, where industrial capitalism had its birth in the rise of the factory system, the rise of cotton mills. So that’s where I started the book.
You know, it was a very ambitious project because it was basically, “Here’s a history of the last 250 years.” But doing it through the eyes of a discrete number of critics—some of them well known, some of them not so well known—gave me a framework. So even though it’s a pretty long book, I think it hopefully hangs together as a single narrative.
Belvedere: You chronicle various crises that capitalism faced. Based on your immersion into this history, do you find that these crisis points, these sagas in which the capitalist system faced a challenge that would often significantly impact the way it functioned and operated in society, have a lot in common with each other? Did capitalism’s various crises exhibit similar dynamics?
Cassidy: My thesis is they did. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes—to use the old cliche. I’ll give a few examples of that. The idea of technological displacement, which is obviously a huge story now because of the AI revolution, is a theme which runs through capitalism from the very beginning: with resistance to cotton to steam power and water power in Northern England, which gave rise to the Luddite movement, then further on in the century, the rise of big factory capitalism gave rise to labor unions. So that’s one running theme.
Another is financial crises. Whatever the underlying dynamics of capitalism are, it’s always given rise to crises every 20 years or so. If you go back to the 1850s, I start my book with Marx and Engels, two of the most famous critics of capitalism, celebrating the 1857 financial crisis, which started in New York and then spread across the Atlantic. They were hopeful for a while that this might be the final crisis of the system.
“One reason for capitalism’s great success is its adaptability. The basic mechanism of using the profit motive and markets—people who make a profit get rewarded; people who don’t make a profit, out of business—that’s proved a remarkably robust model for producing innovation and rising GDP growth. We can argue about how that GDP growth has been distributed. I only have two charts in the entire book. One of them is the hockey stick of GDP growth throughout history. You see it going basically along the ground, the flat part of the stick, for thousands of years until 1800, when you have the industrial revolution and the rise of industrial capitalism. And then it starts to pick up, and from there it basically goes vertical. So that is the strength of capitalism and it survived.” — John Cassidy
The crisis of 1857 wasn’t the same as the crisis of 2008; the Luddite movement is not the same as the resistance to AI. But you can’t look at both of those things and say they’re not commonalities. They obviously are.
Belvedere: I want to come back to AI in just a second, but I want to stay on this point of continuities and discontinuities for a moment. In an earlier phase of my career, I spent many years as a philosophy lecturer at various colleges and universities. That was my main area of focus. But I also spent a couple of years as a U.S. history instructor at the high school level. I taught AP U.S. history, U.S. government and politics, and macroeconomics for a few years. Looking back, one of the analytical tools that I had the most success with as a teacher, pedagogically, was historical comparison and contrast. Of course, I’m not describing anything esoteric here. This is just a basic requirement of what historians do. It simply involves taking enough of a dive into the past to account for all the ways that one era is similar to, but also—and this is a crucial part—different from, another era.
One of my takes—and I don’t think it’s a particularly controversial one—is that a lot of our misunderstandings and distortions about the past are the product of failing to sufficiently account for differences across historical eras. I’ve heard historians lament that the biggest problem is that people by and large are ignorant of the past. And, of course, that’s a perennial problem. But they have in mind ignorance in the more traditional sense, like someone simply not knowing about some past event. The problem I’m referring to involves people knowing something or other about a particular historical episode, but not knowing enough about how the world of that historical moment is different from the world of today. So I just want to give you an example to cue up a question for you.
So, someone will take what they know about working class jobs today, especially in the service economy, and they’ll conceptually transfer that onto past eras and mistakenly conclude certain things about, say, a past era’s level of workplace safety, or the physical toll that a job would take, or many other aspects regarding how jobs were regulated—or unregulated, as it were. In your dive into this history, what’s something that you notice people persistently misunderstand about capitalism’s past that then distorts the picture they form about how our system ought to be configured today?
Cassidy: That’s a very good question. I think the point you make about historical specificity, which is how I’d put it, is a very good one. I’ve already mentioned Marx, but he has a famous quote from when he was writing about the 1848 revolution in France and the rise of Louis Napoleon. And he said: “Men make their own history, but they don’t make it in circumstances which are bequeathed to them.”
Somebody may say, “Well, based on the 2008 crisis, the real problem is always in the credit markets.” So now you’re seeing an example of that: people looking at private credit and saying that that’s where the next financial crisis is going to come from because it looks very similar to subprime, which obviously blew up for the 2008 crisis. Now, that may well be true, but if you focus just on that, you’re likely to ignore other dangers in the financial system. For example, the rise of stable coins—some of them regulated, some of them unregulated. If there’s a crisis in the unregulated stable coins, could that lead to a crisis in the regulated ones, which because they’re backed by U.S. bonds would lead to a crisis in the bond market? We just don’t know.
Even if you’ve got these big ideas—the big idea would be unregulated financial markets are dangerous, which I think is true—you then need to apply that very specifically. I tried to do that going through the book. I’m not saying, “If you study each of these 28 critics, you’ll be able to predict the future.” I don’t think that’s true at all. I think if you study the critiques of the past, it gives you a general framework, which you can then apply to current and future events. But I started off as an economic historian looking very closely at specific data and specific incidents. I got interested in the history of ideas later on.
But you have to start with the historical circumstances and the specifics of each situation. And then you can draw on past thinkers. If you’re thinking about financial markets ... I mentioned Keynes—I have a chapter on Keynes. I think his theories of how financial markets work, the theory of the beauty contest, a lot of the ideas which underpin behavioral economics these days, they’re very useful. But you have to apply them in the specific circumstances.
I think you’re exactly right. I think history is essential, but you’ve got to be careful how you apply it.
Another example would be the huge debate that’s going on now about, can Trumpism or Trumpian economic nationalism be compared to fascism in the 1930s? And the obvious answer is: it can in some respects and can’t in others. I have a chapter on Karl Polanyi, who lived through 1930s fascism, and I write at length about his theories of socialism and fascism. I think they are very useful and you’ll see some historical parallels if you read them but you obviously have to be careful to apply them to the modern era, which is different.
Belvedere: Something your book does quite well is convey the remarkable adaptability of capitalism. And obviously you couldn’t write a book about a theory that has spanned centuries and continues to shape our world today unless the theory in question were in some sense really important and successful. We don’t have lots of books written about the 18th-century theory of phlogiston, since it was discredited and discarded, but capitalism has found a way to persist even in the face of all the challenges you profile in the book.
“We’re in this sort of interregnum period where you’ve got Trump offering one vision of the future, a sort of nationalist, protectionist, anti-immigration future. And you’ve got China offering this state capitalism option, which may or [may not be] a form of capitalism—[it’s a] sort of capitalism without democracy, basically, or with one-party democracy. And then the left and center left are struggling to come up with their managed capitalism for the 21st century. But they’re all varieties of capitalism. Even the most extreme left-wing critics in my book—[e.g.,] the degrowth movement—there doesn’t seem to be much support for going back to a planned centralized economy, which is what socialism was understood as in the 20th century.” — John Cassidy
I’m going to nerd out here for a second. So, the philosopher W.V.O. Quine once made the point that our theories, our major ones, can always be protected against disconfirmation by finding something else in our cognitive maps that the criticism ultimately takes down. In a sense, something else becomes the intellectual scapegoat. And he said: “Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system.” I want to ask you a question about this point.
When faced with serious challenges to a particular iteration of capitalism, what adjustments to other parts of our social or political architecture or system have proponents offered to make instead, so that they can leave capitalism, the version that they favor, untouched?
Cassidy: I answer that question in two ways. First of all, as you said, one reason for capitalism’s great success is its adaptability. The basic mechanism of using the profit motive and markets—people who make a profit get rewarded; people who don’t make a profit, go out of business—that’s proved a remarkably robust model for producing innovation and rising GDP growth. We can argue about how that GDP growth has been distributed. I only have two charts in the entire book. One of them is the hockey stick of GDP growth throughout history. You see it going basically along the ground, the flat part of the stick, for thousands of years until 1800, when you have the industrial revolution and the rise of industrial capitalism. And then it starts to pick up, and from there it basically goes vertical. So that is the strength of capitalism and it survived.
That’s the reason it survived 250 years. Now, that’s not to say it’s survived in the same form. We want to get into the huge debates about what capitalism is, how you define it. As I say, my definition is very simple, sort of: mass production based on the profit motive. Within that framework, there have been all sorts of different forms of capitalism.
That’s because you have to bring politics in. The right-wing thinkers and the classical liberals in some sense saw the government and market capitalism as antithetical. But if you look at history, that isn’t actually what’s happened. Government has fashioned various forms of capitalism over last 250 years and has always stepped in in a crisis, the most recent one being in 2008, to prop up the system. Similarly in the 1930s.
So I see the relationship between the market economy—capitalist economy—and the government as a sort of symbiotic one, which evolves through the years into various forms in a long-term cyclical pattern. You get a rise of government regulation, then there’s a reaction against that and things move on from there. What Polanyi called “the double movement:” you have the attempt to create some sort of a free market and that creates a counter-reaction in the political sphere, which he called the double movement.
Those two things together, I think, explain the durability of capitalism. There had been various forms of the system, starting off with the free market, small business capitalism of early 19th-century Britain, then evolving into the bigger sort of corporate capitalism of a late 19th-century, early 20th-century globalized system, too—late in the imperialist era. And then we had the cataclysm of the First World War and the interwar period. And that gave rise to a postwar, what I call managed capitalism, other people call Keynesian social democracy, which is still capitalism. Most of the economy was still in private hands, but it was a very different form to 19th-century capitalism. And that lasted until about 1980 when Mrs. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were elected in the U.K. and the U.S.
That was a political counter-revolution. Simultaneously, really, in historical terms, the Soviet Union collapsed. So the sort of state socialist model disappeared as an option. China and Russia decided to join the global capitalist economy. We then had this incredible years-long experiment in neoliberal global capitalism—hyper-globalization, I call it—which, as Polanyi would have predicted, produce a big political reaction against it. There was a financial crisis and then the rise of a right-wing populist movement and also a left-wing populist movement, which undermined the centrist parties, which had governed for decades. That’s where we are now.
The question is: What replaces that? We’re in this sort of interregnum period where you’ve got Trump offering one vision of the future, a sort of nationalist, protectionist, anti-immigration future. And you’ve got China offering this state capitalism option, which may or [may not be] a form of capitalism—it’s a sort of capitalism without democracy, basically, or with one-party democracy. And then the left and center left are struggling to come up with their managed capitalism for the 21st century.
But they’re all varieties of capitalism. Even the most extreme left-wing critics in my book—[for example,] the degrowth movement—they don’t seem to be much support for going back to a planned centralized economy, which is what socialism was understood as in the 20th century. It’s much more a return to cooperative, self-governing communities, which actually goes back to some of the people I write about in the early 19th century, when that socialism then was seen as anti-government, really. Self-governing communities, small-scale production—that seems to be the vision which animates young people, especially on the left, more than resurrecting a gospel plan or whatever.
“My first book, which I wrote in 2002, was a history of the dot com bubble. And, as part of that, I lived through it. I reported on it. If you remember the late 1990s, there was a lot of great optimism, in liberal and leftist circles, about the internet that it would break down existing authority. You think of the original people around Wired magazine, for example, and the techno optimists in San Francisco and other places. They saw it as a sort of leveling technology, which would break down existing barriers between people, and as a sort of democratizing instrument. And what we found is it’s very atomizing—people live online by themselves. Obviously, there’s a big debate about it, but I don’t think there can be any denying that it’s led to some social pathologies among younger people who’ve spent long periods online.” — John Cassidy
So that’s where we are. And we’re in this, as I said, interregnum—a sort of political crisis, really.
Belvedere: I want to pick up on that point. I want to quote something from your book that dovetails with what you just said, and then ask you something very specific. Toward the end of the book, you write:
The managed capitalism of the postwar era was based on a hegemonic bloc consisting of manual workers, educated liberals, domestically focused businesses, long-term capital, the continued exclusion of many parts of the world, and Keynesian/social democratic policy ideas. The globalized hyper capitalism that followed the end of the Cold War was based on a bloc consisting of educated workers, internationally minded businesses, short-term capital, the entry of previously excluded parts of the world, and free market policy ideas. The question, going into the second quarter of the 21st century, was what sort of historical bloc, if any, could exercise power in a world shrunken by digital technology, but also increasingly splintered.
I want to ask you: Why has digital technology—which at the very core of it, the spirit of it, is supposed to be a kind of connecting force by design—increasingly splintered us, as you put it?
Cassidy: Yeah, I mean, that’s a very deep technological question. My first book, which I wrote in 2002, was a history of the dot com bubble. And, as part of that, I lived through it. I reported on it. If you remember the late 1990s, there was a lot of great optimism, in liberal and leftist circles, about the internet that, as you said, it would break down existing authority. You think of the original people around Wired magazine, for example, and the techno optimists in San Francisco and other places. They saw it as a sort of leveling technology, which would break down existing barriers between people, and as a sort of democratizing instrument. And what we found is it’s very atomizing—people live online by themselves. Obviously, there’s a big debate about it, but I don’t think there can be any denying that it’s led to some social pathologies among younger people who’ve spent long periods online.
But more than that, also, I think in economic terms, it turns out that because of the way the internet works, because of diminishing marginal costs or zero marginal costs, the structure of the online economy is innately monopolistic. And it’s given rise to these enormous tech monopolies or oligopolies which exercise an enormous amount of power—and in recent years have started to exercise more political power by using their money to basically buy parts of the political system.
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So that sort of development ... I never heard anybody in the 1990s say that that was going to be the outcome. There may have been some people on the far left [who] saw it, but I can’t remember any particular book or I would have quoted it! That’s been a great paradox the last 30 years: that this technology that was seen as a liberating influence, always promoted by developers and enthusiasts as an agent of human liberation. In many ways turned out to be the opposite.
Belvedere: Let’s go from the general to the specific on the question of technology. So, AI is in the subtitle. How, and to what extent, is capitalism’s ongoing place in society impacted by the advent of AI, in your view?
Cassidy: Well, that’s ... I don’t have a one-sentence answer to that. I wrote about it in my book. [It’s] one of the two big subjects—Trumpian economics and AI—I’ve been writing about for the last couple of years. They are the two huge subjects of our day. And, again, it’s a bit like the 1990s: there’s the optimistic view and the pessimistic view. Being a journalist, I tend to be the skeptic and more pessimistic, but I think you acknowledge the optimistic view here that lots of economists see AI as just the latest transformative technology—which, eventually, they accept will [incur] transition costs in terms of labor displacement. They say eventually it’s going to produce a huge leap in labor productivity, which if you look at history should eventually lead to a rising wages and rising living standards. That’s the optimistic view.
I would say, five years ago, even most orthodox [economists] subscribed to that view. What we’ve seen in last few years, I think, is a darker version of the future coming into view—in which, rather than complementing labor and making labor more productive, perhaps these systems are just going to displace it en masse, particularly cognitive workers, people like us. Because if these systems really can do white collar work more efficiently, and obviously much more cheaply, than human beings, there’ll be profit motives to displace huge, huge chunks of labor force. So you get people like Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, saying that there’s going to be 20% GDP growth, but at the same time, half of all white collar occupations are going to disappear in a very short period. So they’re the two polar views.
“What we’ve seen in last few years is a darker version of the future coming into view—in which, rather than complementing labor and making labor more productive, perhaps these systems are just going to displace it en masse, particularly cognitive workers, people like us. Because if these systems really can do white collar work more efficiently, and obviously much more cheaply, than human beings, there’ll be profit motives to displace huge, huge chunks of labor force. So you get people like Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, saying that there’s going to be 20% GDP growth, but at the same time, half of all white collar occupations are going to disappear in a very short period.” — John Cassidy
The other aspect which is very worrying is we’ve had a huge rise in inequality in the age of hyper-globalization. You can see AI accentuating that even further because, where does all the wealth go that the workers used to earn? Well, in that scenario, it will go to the owners of the AI technology, which if you aggregate that up, basically another shift in the distribution of income towards capital. And, to be fair to some of the technologists, some of the AI barons, they’ve acknowledged this—Amodei being one of them. He’s talking about: “We’re going to have to tax capital income much more, maybe provide universal business incomes to redistribute some of the wealth.”
So that’s, I think, where the debate is now on AI. I would say, five years ago, the consensus among orthodox economists was optimistic, and now it’s sort of, “Well, we’re not quite sure what’s going to happen.”
I wrote on this subject: about strictly orthodox economists starting to acknowledge that questions of distribution were going to be central. The economist I wrote about suggests we set up a sovereign wealth fund to invest in these companies and provide dividends to people. Other people think that [the right approach is] just taxing the capital and providing universal business income. There are various ideas out there, but I think that’s where the political debate is going to go in the next decade or so. And I think it’s going to cross party lines because you’re already seeing some Republicans critical of big tech and sort of worried about AI, too.
Belvedere: Yeah, the first time a lot of people really started to think about these issues a little bit more was, funny enough, when Andrew Yang foregrounded this idea that the increase of automation [will require] us to seriously contemplate something like a UBI. We need people to have purchasing power. We need the economy to not be so misallocated. And so, [Yang’s thinking goes], we may have to turn to that if automation, if AI, gets to the point where some people are thinking it might.
Cassidy: You raise a very good point that I should have mentioned: purchasing power. I mean, that goes back to the late 19th century, when the rise of the robber barons, big industries, big iron, big steel, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan, big finance. In the late 19th century, the wealth was piling up. That’s the Gilded Age. And some economists did then [ask]: Who would be the consumers if the workers can’t afford it? [This is] the idea of under-consumption. That idea eventually gave rise to Keynesian economics. But in the late 19th century, it was associated with a British thinker, who I write about, John Hobson, who wrote about imperialism. And under-consumption was the idea then. So these ideas go back a long time.
Now, what were the solutions? Why didn’t it bring down capitalism?
One of the solutions was the rise of organized labor. And the sort of Henry Ford view of the world was: you had to pay the workers because who’s going to buy his cars if they didn’t? [That] eventually led to the Treaty of Detroit, in which the great auto companies in the U.S. basically agreed to share productivity growth with the workers in the form of higher wages in return for which the labor unions agreed to let the managers run the company and make investment decisions.
That was the political economy of the post-war American social democracy—and very similar in Europe, too. So the question is: Is there some version of that [for this problem]? Obviously, this is not mass production—it’s a paradoxical idea of capitalism without labor—especially if robots get involved.
Does the term “capitalism without labor” even make any sense? I mean, it is a basic question. But assuming it does, what sort of social bargain can be struck to both make the system acceptable to people, but also to make it work on its own terms because, as you said, who’s gonna be buying all the goods and services that these robots and AI systems produce? That’s the fundamental question.
Belvedere: Who knows, maybe the next versions that they package will be consumers as well. So that handles that problem!
Cassidy: Maybe, that really would be nice. But somebody’s going to need to fill all the Delta seats down to the Caribbean in the winter.
Belvedere: Let me shift to the other great focus of your work the last couple of years: Trumpian economics. I had asked a question about the 20th century, but let’s narrow the temporal window here to the decade that just passed.
So, the MAGA movement has by and large treated the prior conservative fusionism with great hostility. It’s dispensed with appeals to the importance of market liberalism. It’s leaned into economic populism. It’s embraced tariffs. From 2012 to 2016, the Republican Party went from Mitt Romney to Donald Trump, two figures offering very different approaches to economic matters. What accounts for the steep divergence in just a few years from one approach to markets and trade and all the rest of it to a totally different one?
Cassidy: Well, I think Trump was a great opportunist. Whatever else you think of him, you’ve got to give him credit for realizing the political opportunity. He realized that the system we’ve talked about—the hyper-globalization, neoliberalism, or whatever you want to call it—produced great wealth and great innovation, but had failed in one of the basic tasks of the system: raising the living standards of ordinary working people. Go back and look at weekly inflation-adjusted wages over the decades. It basically goes up pretty steadily until about 1973. And they just get stuck for 40 years. Now, there are various arguments about what indices you use. Some people say if you use a different price index, it goes up further. Whichever price index that you go [with], it doesn’t go up anything like it did before that period. So that, I think, was the fundamental issue.
There was just a lot of economic discontent. Then, when China entered the global economy and then entered the World Trade Organization in the first decade of the century, we had the huge China shock which hit a lot of American basic industry. Textiles basically disappeared; a lot of manufacturing industries [did, too]. That hurt a lot of working class towns and cities which were already struggling.
And there was just a lot of political alienation from the system. Trump came along and, to give him his credit, he realized there was a political opportunity there. I’ve seen interviews where he said he was thinking of running from the left but couldn’t because Bernie Sanders was already occupying that space. So he ran from the right and basically effected this hostile takeover of the Republican Party, and it was just very successful. The Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan party was a successful political organization, but just didn’t have the foot soldiers that Trump did. Romney or Ryan could go to Ohio and hold a political rally and they could turn up a couple thousand people, maybe Tea Party activists or whatever. Trump could turn up and there are 25,000, 50,000 people [there].
“There was this crisis of legitimacy in the system and Trump put himself forward as the leader of it. Democrats had their own critic of the system, Bernie Sanders, but he didn’t win—the establishment won the election. And it was very difficult for somebody like Hillary Clinton, who’d been integrally involved in the political establishment for 30 years, to promote herself as an outsider. It was an outsider’s election and it’s been an outsider’s election ever since. Trump’s greatest strength is that a lot of Americans still, 10 years later, don’t see him as a regular politician.” — John Cassidy
I remember going out in 2016 to Bethpage, Long Island—you know, not a poor area at all—and there he was, having a rally, where I think he held 12,000, with thousands more people outside. At that point, I realized this is a mass movement which you’ve got to take seriously. You know, I got in trouble. Lots of people resisted the idea when I said he was going to win the Republican primary and that he could win the election. But it turned out to be true. It wasn’t that I had any great insights. I just was seeing what was happening on the ground.
So I think that’s what happened. There was this crisis of legitimacy in the system and Trump put himself forward as the leader of it. Democrats had their own critic of the system, Bernie Sanders, but he didn’t win—the establishment won the election. And it was very difficult for somebody like Hillary Clinton, who’d been integrally involved in the political establishment for 30 years, to promote herself as an outsider. It was an outsider’s election and it’s been an outsider’s election ever since. Trump’s greatest strength is that a lot of Americans still, 10 years later, don’t see him as a regular politician. Even though he’s been in charge of the system for so long, for five years as president—four last time and one this time—[and while] his ratings are terrible, to the extent he still has a political movement, it’s built on the idea of him as the outsider.
Belvedere: That’s an interesting dynamic to keep an eye on in the future: Is it going to be a seesaw from this point on, a permanent [back and forth] between establishment and counter-establishment moves one cycle to the other? You couldn’t have gotten more of an outsider than Trump, certainly not from that lineup when he won it. [But] Biden? You couldn’t have had someone more entrenched in Washingtonian politics. His career there was longer than other people’s actual years alive; he had more time in the Senate than some of his rivals had years on this earth. Will that be the dynamic moving forward?
Cassidy: I think it will, to some extent. We already see, in the opinion polls, that the excesses of the second Trump era are very unpopular. [These days], there’s always this turn against the incumbent. But I think what will determine the future more is which party or candidate produces a political platform that actually tackles some of these issues. Trump’s a populist in rhetoric ... the Democratic Party ... is sort of adopting populist rhetoric ... but [both are] basically financed by large businesses. So I think that’s the great tension. There is basically unlimited money. Do you produce a genuinely populist movement in a political system that is corrupted by design?
Belvedere: That’s interesting that you see populism as a fixture moving forward. Or, if not outright populism, then at least more of an appeal to the masses than they’ve [done] in the past.
Cassidy: Totally. A good left-wing populist could capture some of that basic dynamic—throughout Europe and the U.S.—as a reaction against the status quo. You’ve got to channel that somewhere to have any political future, I think.
Belvedere: The most noteworthy figure who has championed a kind of left-wing populism has been Bernie Sanders. We brought up the 2008 financial crisis [earlier]. It’s very easy to see how the financial crisis led to Bernie. It’s very easy to see Occupy Wall Street being a throughline to someone like Bernie. But do you think we would have gotten Trump had we not had that 2008 financial crisis?
Cassidy: The short answer is no. I think the financial crisis undermined the existing political establishment in both parties. The problem with the Democrats and Obama ... you know, when the financial system basically collapses, or is on the verge of collapse, that is a terrible political problem to have. Because you have two options: [Bail it out, or] let it collapse, in which case the specter of the 1930s and the Great Depression is there because that’s exactly what we did then. We just let the banks collapse for three years. And it wasn’t until Roosevelt came in and declared a bank holiday and introduced deposit insurance that it stabilized the financial system.
So I think the bailout was politically horrible, but it was necessary in economic terms. Even though it was introduced by George W. Bush, Obama then implemented it in a lot of [further] ways. And then the Republicans, the Tea Party, very cynically—even though it was their party that introduced the bailout—pinned it on Obama very cleverly. It was a very difficult political challenge for Obama; he didn’t manage to free himself from that association. Then, going forward after that, we did have a very slow economic recovery, if you remember. It wasn’t 2% growth—it was less than 2% growth for years on end, which didn’t lead to a big rebound in wages or living standards. So there was still a lot of economic resentment and insecurity in 2016 for Trump and Bernie to run on.
Belvedere: Well, can I ask you about that? Because the other piece of this is the messaging apparatus that the right has had and has activated and built up. Isn’t it true that our recovery was in many ways outpacing recoveries in other parts of the world?
Cassidy: Oh, no, that’s true. Relative to past recoveries, it wasn’t particularly strong. But relative the rest of the world, it was. The U.S. has had a very strong economy for 15 years. You just look at Europe’s GDP versus U.S.’ GDP. Until about 2006 to 2007, they were basically converging. Since then, the U.S. has greatly outperformed Europe. So, yeah, it’s definitely the messaging apparatus. I think the whole populist online movement ... the Republicans were quicker to weaponize all that stuff. I think the Democrats are getting it together now, but it’s taken them a long time to catch up.
Belvedere: I have a theory as to why that is. It’s because [many conservative commentators] weren’t a part of the mainstream discourse and were always kind of insurgent figures—Rush Limbaugh was an insurgent figure. That was the model that then the rest of the right-wing influencer space became. They had a many-years headstart of how to operate in that space—of how to be a bomb thrower.
Cassidy: I think you’re right that the talk-show right provided a template.
Belvedere: Yes, and we liberals never had that.
Cassidy: It’s difficult. I mean, there were attempts at it—think of Radio America—but it just never really took off. Because, as you say, we’re reading the establishment’s journals like The New York Times or The New Yorker. So they felt like they were already reasonably well-served, whereas the people on the right thought that they weren’t well-served and Rush Limbaugh was telling them the truth and all the “liberal media” wasn’t.
Belvedere: Yeah, they spoke the language way before we did.
Cassidy: Right. And, again, Trump himself is a figure of the internet. I’ve followed Trump since the late ’80s when I used to be a Wall Street correspondent and he had his first rise and fall. He’s always been the same Trump. He’s basically a real estate developer and a promoter, a self-promoter. It’s just inconceivable to me that he would have ever had any political career whatsoever without the internet, because the established media organs and organs of communication thought he was a joke. And that was to his great advantage in 2016. He’s basically a creature of the internet. I mean, his Twitter account was the key to his rise.
Belvedere: Yeah, I remember doing this little feature for Arc Digital. I had collected his worst tweets ever. There was so much to choose from. So many terrible tweets—tweets that got so much engagement from people. I held a contest to choose his worst tweet ever.
Cassidy: Well, that’s the thing. I think he was the right man in the right place. I remember in the 1980s or the ’90s when he was obsessed about getting in Page 6 in the New York Post. He’s always been obsessed about getting his name in the papers. But then here came this magical technology. He was basically born for the attention economy. Most journalists, they had to learn that the most extreme thing you say is going to be rewarded. Because, in prior journalism, if you say something crazy, you lose your job. But on the internet, you get rewarded for extremes. The only thing that attracts any attention is extremes. Trump didn’t develop it, but he was born for that environment.
Belvedere: That’s a great point. The guy he sometimes gets analogized to, Andrew Jackson, he had to be a war figure to get the kind of cred to catapult him to the office. What did Trump need to do? The birther sequence on Twitter, where he would just fire off a bunch of stuff about Obama and [allege] his illegitimacy—and that’s what catapulted him rather than some [actual credential or form of service].
Cassidy: Right. In this post-truth [moment], he realized there was nobody fact-checking him. Well, there were people fact-checking him online, but it didn’t make any difference. It made him more popular. Yeah, I think it’s instinctual. I don’t think he had a great brainwave that this was how it worked out. He was born for that.
Belvedere: Thomas Carlyle appears in your book as a critic of capitalism from the right, who rejected both market liberalism and democracy. Do you see Carlyle’s dark, proto-authoritarian conservatism in today’s version?
Cassidy: That’s a good question. I put Carlyle in there for a couple of reasons. Number one, I didn’t want all the critics to be lefties. I wanted some righties in there, too. And number two, I think Carlyle is a sort of antediluvian figure. He was a great fan of medieval monarchies and Frederick the Great; great fan of the German royal family. And he totally rejected modern democracy. But also, he was a critic of capitalism. That’s what I think most people ... he’s sort of seen as a proto-fascist figure, basically. He was also an inveterate racist and pro-slavery, or at least a critic of people who were critical of slavery. But in terms of his sort of economic views, he was actually quite left wing. He wrote books and essays about the impact that industrialization was having on the working classes. Wages did eventually rise, but in early 19th-century Britain, they didn’t. So there was a lot of sort of immiseration. And he wrote about that.
“Trump himself is a figure of the internet. I’ve followed Trump since the late ’80s when I used to be a Wall St. correspondent and he had his first rise and fall. He’s always been the same Trump. He’s basically a real estate developer and a promoter, a self-promoter. It’s just inconceivable to me that he would have ever had any political career whatsoever without the internet, because the established media organs and organs of communication thought he was a joke … But on the internet, you get rewarded for extremes. The only thing that attracts any attention is extremes. Trump didn’t develop it, but he was born for that environment.” — John Cassidy
He also wrote about the impact on morals. He had a great moral critique of capitalism. He called the profit motive “the shabbiest gospel ever invented.” You still do see elements of that sort of right-wing critique of capitalism. And you see it in various ways. You’re starting to see it now in certain right-wing politicians criticizing big tech monopolies for profiteering, and their social media companies for delivering pornography. That sort of capitalism has no morality, [he contended]. That was exactly the critique that Carlyle was making in the 1830s and 1840s. So he’s a very old fashioned figure in some ways, but, again, it’s one of those ironies [of] how the old critiques come around again. And you could certainly write a piece about today using some of Carlyle’s language.
Belvedere: You write that, in the 2020s thus far, and certainly in the first few years of the 2020s, global capitalism has been “facing a crisis of legitimacy of a sort it hadn’t experienced since the 1930s, one that extended to the right as well as the left.” Can you expound just briefly on that?
Cassidy: Yeah, that goes back to 2016 when I was first thinking about the book, and we had Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as major presidential candidates with critiques of the system and both mobilizing huge crowds. That really is something new in American history in my lifetime. I think the only parallel is the 1930s when there was the Great Depression, [which] gave rise to critiques from the right and the left. There was a crisis of legitimacy. Roosevelt, historically, was the great savior of American capitalism; he came along and built the Keynesian capitalism, Keynesian social democracy, which preserved the essentials of the system—the profit, most of industry in private hands—but built around it this government framework in terms of Keynesian economics, a welfare state, security, and basically saved the system and rescued it from its crisis of legitimacy.
That’s what it seemed to me in 2016—here we are 10 years later in 2026 [and it’s] even more true. The system is facing a crisis of legitimacy. That’s why I call this period a sort of interregnum period in which it’s just not clear what is the next model out there. Trump has got his model—maybe that’s going to succeed, but I don’t think it will because it doesn’t actually tackle the fundamental contradictions of the system.
Belvedere: The book emphasizes that fascism wasn’t historically a grassroots phenomenon. It gained power through elite support. What does this tell us about the current moment when billionaires and tech “bropreneurs,” as I call them, are increasingly aligned with authoritarian nationalist politics?
Cassidy: It’s a bit more nuanced than that. I mean, unfortunately, the fascist movements in the interwar period did have mass support. They didn’t have popular support, but if you look at the German example, the National Socialists got 28% of the vote in the last election before the elites brought Hitler into power thinking that they could control him. But you’re right: he was brought into power effectively by the elites.
In Italy, Mussolini basically forced his way to power. But, again, he made a sort of compact with big business, set up industrial monopolies. So there was a coalition there, too. I mean, in terms of today, there are obviously some parallels in the sense that Trump and right-wing economic nationalism does have popular support. Trump’s ratings, even now, are still in the high 30s, 35 to 40%. He’s got that bedrock base of support who seem to support him whatever [happens]. I saw a poll the other day and that still said, of the people who voted for him in 2024, more than 90% still approve of his performance. So he’s got that bedrock base. Fortunately, it’s not a majority and I don’t think it ever will be a majority.
“Tribalism isn’t compatible with classical liberalism, of course, which is based on reason and the Enlightenment. [But Trump’s is an] internally inconsistent movement. You also see that in the grab bag of interventionist steps that he’s taking in terms of demanding stakes in companies, issuing edicts to Big Pharma. You could see some of those things being done by an heir to Bernie Sanders from the left. And you [might] think, ‘Well, that’s consistent with their worldview,’ whether you agree with it or you don’t. They’re basically trying to restrain corporate power in some way. But from Trump, it just comes across as inconsistent and, as you said, linked to some personal vendetta rather than any sort of consistent political philosophy.” — John Cassidy
The contradiction of Trump is that he’s got this populist working class base, but in economic terms, he’s also aligned with the industrial oligarchs, especially the tech oligarchs, who are completely against expanding the welfare state, raising social security. Their whole goal is to shrink government. We saw that with Elon Musk and DOGE. So you’ve got this contradiction in that Trump has got this populist rhetoric, but the structure of his alliances [means] that he can’t deliver it in any way. That’s why I think it’s ultimately not going to be a successful political movement, but it’s an incredibly powerful protest movement. So, you know, when you get the next Democratic incumbent or whatever, there’ll always be the base of Trump supporters there that people can motivate.
I don’t think the Trump movement is going away. Somebody else will inherit it. Whether it’ll be as strong as him, who knows. But, as I said, I don’t think Trumpian economics is, to get back to one of your previous questions, when you had talked about historical blocks of support ... that’s a phrase from Gramsci, the Italian Marxist. I don’t think the Trump movement is a stable historical block. I think it’s an unstable block with inner contradictions. That’s why I think ultimately it will fail, unless of course it just goes full authoritarian and then obviously it could succeed if it got rid of democracy and got rid of elections. Obviously we would be full blown fascism. In terms of succeeding as a democratic movement, I’m optimistic that it won’t win out in the long term.
Belvedere: I’ll stick up for my kind of classical liberalism here. The way that Trump is approaching the shrinking of government is not something that any true defender of liberty or classical liberalism should want. Because there’s shrinking of government wherever there’s waste or an inefficiency, [and then there’s] the repurposing and reconceptualizing of it as a tool of punitive action against people he perceives as his foes. He’s weaponizing it.
Cassidy: Some of the classical liberals are standing up to him, joining the Never Trump movement. I respect them for that. I wasn’t trying to say that Trump is a classical liberal in that sense. I just mean that he’s got these sort of techno-libertarians, whatever you want to call them, behind him who have a very dark view of the future.
Belvedere: One thing that I think is a good distinction to make, for people wondering whether he is just following a standard libertarian approach … I think this is a bit of psychoanalysis here on my part, but the thing that bothers Musk, Sacks, and some of these other tech guys, and Trump [himself as well], the most is not that government is a certain level of bigness and they want to cut it down to size, as if they have this minimal state ideal. It’s nothing like that. Instead, it’s: “Liberals like initiatives like USAID. Let’s gut them for that reason alone.” It’s: “You like this, so I hate this now.”
Cassidy: Right—tribalist owning the libs, I agree. Tribalism isn’t compatible with classical liberalism, of course, which is based on reason and the Enlightenment. So, I agree with you there. But, again, I think you’re just highlighting the fact that it’s a sort of internally inconsistent movement. And you also see that in the grab bag of interventionist steps that he’s taking in terms of demanding stakes in companies, issuing edicts to Big Pharma. You could see some of those things being done by an heir to Bernie Sanders from the left. And you might think, “Well, that’s consistent with their worldview,” whether you agree with it or you don’t. They’re basically trying to restrain corporate power in some way. But from Trump, it just comes across as inconsistent and, as you said, linked to some personal vendetta rather than any sort of consistent political philosophy.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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