Unlock the White House Watch watch newsletter for free
Your guide on what the US elections of 2024 mean for Washington and Le Monde
The writer is the author of the next book “Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right”
For years, right -wing populist parties have used forms of direct democracy to pursue their objectives. Referendums prohibiting minarets in Switzerland in the Brexit vote, the idea was to short-circuit the establishment and to draw directly from the popular will. In the United States, Maga is now experimenting with something different: direct economy.
Similar to plebiscites and referendums, the direct economy seeks to make an end of experts and holders and to communicate directly to citizens and individual voters. He tries to demystify what has long been naturalized processes captured in stock market indices, interest rates and even fiduciary currency, to expose them as simple elite tools by further oppressing real people.
We can see the direct economy in action in three different ways. The first is the centralization of the executive power of the pricing policy of American president Donald Trump. The arbitrariness of his pricing ads is considered to be a demerit by many. However, from the point of view of direct economy, it is this very arbitrariness that is their strength.
When European merchants must wait until Trump wakes up to find out what the day’s flow will be will be, it is not a sign of weakness for him but of power. This shows that the abstract ideas of the treatment “most favored by the nation” or the pooling of multilateral sovereignty were always shadows on the face of American omnipotence and the capacity of the president to move action worldwide.
A second form of direct economy is cash transfers, which were deployed by Trump during the pandemic. The prominent signature on the front of the stimulus checks that landed in the mailboxes of the Americans was a sign that the benefit of the State did not have to circulate in the supposedly corroded pipes of the Social Security Administration or the health insurance, and even less the indirect provisioning of health and human services or the Ministry of Education. It was a public good as a private account.
Trump Megadonor and Zealous Maga Convert Elon Musk have resumed this approach in his attempts to influence the elections, offering checks of $ 1 million in random news to people who support his particular candidate. More recently, Musk gave two of these checks in Wisconsin during an election that his favorite candidate finally lost. Apparently angry that this tactic was born, he posted petulant after the corruption of the judiciary was the “long idiot of the left”. One wonders if a version of the direct economy where a double ballot as a lottery ticket could be considered as a form of corruption itself.
The third form of direct economy is more esoteric. It revolves around the shiny gold metal. Since the seizure of private gold by Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1930s and the ban on the detention of private gold by individuals until the 1970s, a small subsection of economic thinkers has cultivated the conviction that the American government seeks to have gold. They say that the objective is to prevent people from being able to fend for themselves after the inevitable monetary collapse caused by social protection spending and attempts at what they consider as social engineering.
A secondary intrigue of this is that the gold held by the American government is in fact not there. The mediation of value through paper is considered the biggest thing ever played on humanity and which will inevitably arrive at an ugly conclusion. Since the 1980s, the main Goldbug in the United States, the former Republican Senator in Texas, Ron Paul, called for a gold audit in Fort Knox, has even filed legislation for this purpose in 2011.
Musk resumed this idea and called So that Paul himself is part of his so-called Department of Government Effectiveness. “Who confirms that gold was not stolen from Fort Knox? Maybe he is there, maybe this is not the case,” Musk published in February. There is now a discussion on a gold audit, supported by Paul’s son, Senator Rand Paul.
There is actually a precedent for this approach. In 2012, a precious metal consultant and former employee of Booz Allen from Munich launched a similar campaign which took momentum in Germany, finally culminating in the transfer of a large amount of gold bars from the United States to the Bundesbank and their public exhibition. “We are doing this to show citizens that the gold bars are here,” journalists told a member of the Bundesbank board of directors. The precious metal consultant was Peter Boehringer, who has now represented the alternative for Germany (AFD) in the Bundestag for two electoral cycles.
Direct economy constitutes a powerful attack on existing institutions and people who stand between citizens and their leaders. That its tactics, its gadgets and their whims can survive their tumultuous effects on the conventional markets is something that in the coming weeks and months show. Until now, the interest rate on the invoices of the US Treasury slides down, and consumer confidence also falls. The bet of the direct economy is that none of this will matter.
