In the New Left Review, I think out loud about the longue durée of the tariff question in American politics.

Tariffs occupy an outsized place in the American imagination. The first proposal entertained by Congress was a tariff. The slaveholding South first pondered secession, in 1832, over a tariff. After the Civil War, Republicans declared the tariff ‘the foundationstone’ of their crusade against the Democrats. In 1896, William McKinley ran on the slogan ‘Protection and Prosperity’. In 1930, Herbert Hoover destroyed whatever chance he had at reelection for the sake of the tariff. Teddy Roosevelt caught the crazed drift of the country when he declared that, in any discussion of the tariff, ‘I am not meeting a material need but a mental attitude.’

The tariff is a proxy for other people’s poison.

I also take on the comparison between Trump and McKinley, encouraged by Trump and the Trumpologists, and what it tells us about our political moment.

Trump and the Trumpologists often compare him to McKinley. But where McKinley used the tariff to unite the masses and the classes, Trump’s tariffs – and the markets they’re roiling – threaten to drive a wedge through his coalition…

And I try to think through what that little court case in Florida over the tariff question might portend.

In America, the political scientist Louis Hartz unhappily noted, law flourishes ‘on the corpse’ of political imagination. Every social antagonism gets fed into the maw of the Constitution or the courts. That means, however, that every text of law and the courts contains a spark of social friction, ready to set the political field on fire. The trick is to find it.

You can read more here.