Where would we be without the market? The stock market, the bond market, the financial markets in general—all of these institutions, journalists tell us, are the ultimate, perhaps only, check on President Trump’s power.

Esteemed scholars reassure us of the same—that the world’s oldest constitution is backstopped by Wall Street and the dollar. Investors, the argument goes, need their investments protected. The courts, independent and powerful, can provide that protection. Threaten the courts, and the markets will tumble, and the dollar will drop. It is capitalism, in other words, and not citizens or politicians, that will force the White House into compliance with the courts and the Constitution.

This faith in capitalism is both novel and strange. Historically, people have feared that capitalism undermines the sovereignty of the state and the people. “Our true monarch is not Victoria,” complained the English writer John Ruskin in 1866, “but Victor Mammon.” Today, the American state is in the hands of a rich man, and behind him, at least until recently, a richer man—the richest man in the world, in fact. Lining up against them is a host of experts, from legal scholars to Harvard professors to financial journalists, hoping that a different group of rich men, the investor class, and the markets they move through, will save us from these two. No one dares, at least not yet, pick up the political tools that people traditionally have wielded against runaway rulers and oligarchs. 

How did we get here? Adam Smith and a little-known Marxist from Poland can help answer that question.

That’s me, writing in a new essay that just came out this morning, which the editors have given the wonderful title “But for the Grace of Wall Street Go I.” It’s in an excellent journal called “ARC,” which I highly recommend. Please click on the link to the piece and check out the journal. I try to lend some perspective to the first 130 days or so of the Trump administration, with the help of Smith and Michał Kalecki, up to and including the events in Los Angeles and other cities. The conclusion to the piece?

Smith knew of situations where all power, political and economic, lay in the no-longer-invisible hands of one group. In such situations—he was thinking of the European conquest of indigenous peoples—the only hope would be that all groups would “arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear,” could awaken “some sort of respect for the rights of one another.” Smith was fuzzy on the details, and cagey about what would produce that equality of force and fear. That’s what we’ve been left to figure out.

As I said, check it out.