Among of the influences shaping my sociohistorical approach is the French Annales school. Founded in the early twentieth century by such historians as Marc Bloch, Annales school historians revolutionized the study of their subject matter by emphasizing long-term cultural, economic, and social trends over short-term political events and personalities. The Annales school captured this idea with the concept of the longue durée (“long duration”) to conceptualize, among other things, the collective mentalities that shape human history over centuries. They criticized traditional historiography, which is typically focused on events and “great men,” seeking instead to uncover the deeper dynamics of everyday life, such as agricultural cycles or trade patterns—that is, the enduring material or social forces that underpin the historical process.
In this essay, which takes the long view, I argued that the slavocracy that ruled the US South and the emergence of the corporatocracy in the aftermath of the Civil War are related instantiations of world capitalist ambition. Indeed, the latter is the former’s offspring. The fact that the Democratic Party has represented both political economic configurations is an important feature of this history, one that explains the current situation. Some will tell you that the parties flipped at points. On the contrary, the parties have been remarkably consistent over the centuries. The essay will conclude with an analysis of Trump trade strategy using the frame of dependency theory and problematize the left’s opposition to it. As I see it, the choice is not between whether we will have capitalism or socialism, but what kind of capitalism we will have. More than this, in geopolitical terms, the choice before us whether we will preserve the Westphalian system of sovereign nation states or submit to a global neofeudalism under the command of a transnational corporate elite.
The slavocracy constituted a new quasi-feudalistic order whose intellectuals and practitioners developed racialist thinking as means of dividing the working class to render the proletariat politically inert. At its core, the slavocracy was globalist, its elites seeking integration with the world capitalist system. To this end, advocates for the slavocracy pushed to overthrow the American System (which featured tariffs for revenue generation and to protect its industries and workers), which it saw as a barrier to opening the world to free trade, desired by the Democrats and the elites the party represented to sell primary commodities to England and France and fuel European industrialization—at the expense of American businesses and workers.
The slavocracy constituted a New Aristocracy—a continuation of the Ancien Régime in another form, the Old Aristocracy of Europe. As such, it was a moribund social formation. The rise of the populist Republican Party, reclaiming the ideas of the Founding, smashed the New Aristocracy, only to see it rise again as the corporatocracy after Reconstruction, the period the South called “Redemption.” The populist movement of today represents the second reclaiming of the Founders vision of an independent and free capitalist society based on liberal principles and governed by democratic-republican norms.
The corporatocracy fostered the development of a new governing philosophy, that of progressivism, establishing a technocratic order and widespread dependency on government. This system, rolled out in earnest in the early twentieth century under the administration of Woodrow Wilson, was fully institutionalized during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, which normalized labor unions and integrated them in the emerging corporatist order. Both Wilson and Roosevelt were Democrats. After WWII, the Democrats effectively pursued, with great success, the world capitalist order they had sought during the slavocracy. They used globalization to smash the labor unions they had welcomed to the party only decades earlier.
There is a French phrase I have found useful over the years: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. It translates literally to “The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.” What it means it that, despite apparent transformations, underlying realities often remain constant. Appearances can be rather superficial. Adopting the Annales school’s concept of the longue durée is therefore useful for showing this.
This was my approach in my dissertation, which I never published because I had foolishly incorporated critical race theory in its analytical architecture; nonetheless, I was able to show that what persisted beneath all the apparent change over several centuries of history was the dynamic of capitalist production and racial caste—and analogous situations of unfreedom millions of American that persisted throughout.
There are other influences that shape my thinking that bear on the present question. Dependency theory, which emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a critique of mainstream economic development models (the modernization paradigm), argues that global economic structures perpetuate the underdevelopment of certain regions rather than fostering their progress. In this view, the poorer regions of the world are not poor because they are undeveloped but rather are underdeveloped because of their dependency on richer nations. This way of looking at the matter also helps us understand the underdevelopment of human populations within a nation who are made dependent on institutions operated by an administrative elite.
Dependency theory posits that poorer nations, referred to in the literature as the “Global South,” are kept in a state of dependency by wealthier nations in the “Global North.” The Global North exploits the Global South for resources and cheap labor while maintaining control over advanced industrial processes and profits. This dynamic, captured by the phrase “development of underdevelopment,” finds the prosperity of the core (or developed) countries directly tied to the impoverishment of the periphery (underdeveloped) countries by locking them into a cycle of exporting primary commodities without industrializing themselves.
One of the key theorists of the way of thinking is André Gunder Frank. He emphasized the historical roots of this exploitation in colonialism and the extraction of surplus value. Raúl Prebisch is another one key theorist. Through his work with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), Prebisch highlighted unequal trade relationships and advocated for import-substitution industrialization to break the dependency cycle. Other notable figures, such as Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein, expanded the theory, integrating it with world-systems analysis to explore global capitalism’s structural inequalities.
This understanding can be applied to the period of slavocracy in the United States, which lasted from the seventieth to the mid-nineteenth centuries). The Southern US was a peripheral region within a broader transatlantic capitalist system, with England and France as major economic powers. Using enslaved labor, the South specialized in producing primary commodities—cotton, sugar, and tobacco—which it exported to fuel the textile industries of England and, to a lesser extent, France.
This analysis fits well in dependency theory’s core-periphery dynamic: the South remained underdeveloped industrially, lacking significant manufacturing capacity, while England and France reaped the benefits of processing raw cotton into finished goods, which were often sold back to the South (or elsewhere) at higher value. The South’s aristocracy grew wealthy via this arrangement, but this wealth was concentrated in that class and the strata that saw to its interests. What wealth was reinvested was sunk in the plantation system rather than towards diversification or industry and infrastructure, reinforcing its dependency on foreign industrial centers.
Trade policies, such as Britain’s demand for cheap cotton and reluctance to support Southern industrialization, furthered this imbalance. The South’s reliance on imported manufactured goods from Europe stifled local investment and innovation, entrenching the cycle of underdevelopment in the manner dependency theorists describe in colonized regions. This relationship illustrates how the “development of underdevelopment” operated even within a domestic context, shaped by global capitalist networks.
The South’s dependent economic relationship with Britain and France lie at the core of significant tension between the Southern aristocracy and the industrializing Northern states. The situation was a major contributor to the growing antagonisms that culminated in the Civil War. The South’s heavily reliance on exporting primary commodities to Europe fueled their textile industries, which locked the South into a classic dependency pattern, producing raw materials using superexploited labor while importing manufactured goods from Europe.
Meanwhile, the Northern states, developing their own industrial base, producing textiles, machinery, and other goods, sought to expand their domestic markets, including in the South. An internal economic rivalry was thus set in motion, as the North aimed to integrate the South into its growing industrial economy, while the South sought to maintain its lucrative, dependent ties with Europe.
The issue of tariffs became a flashpoint in this rivalry. Northern industrialists supported protective tariffs—such as the Tariff of 1828 (the “Tariff of Abominations”) and later the Morrill Tariff of 1861—to shield their nascent industries from European competition and encourage Southern consumption of Northern goods. These tariffs raised the cost of imported European manufactures, which the South relied on, and threatened its export-driven economy by risking retaliation from Britain and France, who might reduce cotton purchases.
The South saw tariffs as a direct attack on its economic model. Moreover, the South viewed the North’s push for tariffs (and later abolition) as an existential threat to its plantation system and way of life. The North rightly grew frustrated with the South’s resistance to national integration and industrial progress. Events like the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33, where South Carolina attempted to nullify federal tariffs, underscored how deeply economic dependency on Europe sharpened sectional conflict.
That the Democratic Party played a key role in opposing tariffs to preserve these dependent relations, a history obscured by the moral calamity of slavery, is crucial to grasp. During the antebellum period, Democrats—dominated by Southern planters and their allies—championed free trade policies that aligned with the South’s interests. They argued that low tariffs kept European markets open for cotton and ensured affordable access to foreign goods, sustaining the plantation economy’s profitability. Figures like John C. Calhoun and later Jefferson Davis even framed tariffs as Northern aggression, favoring industrial interests over agrarian interests—with its quasi-feudalist way of life.
In contrast, the Whig Party, and later Republicans, with strong Northern support, backed tariffs as part of a broader vision of economic nationalism, including infrastructure and manufacturing growth. The partisan divide over trade policy reflected and reinforced the sectional economic split: Democrats clung to a global dependency model benefiting the South, while Northern interests pushed for a self-sufficient, industrialized Union. Americans lived in a nation divided against itself.
By the 1850s, these economic disagreements—rooted in the South’s European ties—merged with the slavery debate, making compromise increasingly impossible and propelling the nation toward war, which the South triggered by attacking Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Fort Sumter was a federal installation located in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The Union garrison surrendered the next day.
The attack came after months of escalating tensions following Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and the secession of seven Southern states (later joined by four more) to form the Confederate States of America. Thus, the South’s dependent relationship with Europe not only strained its ties with the North but entrenched a political stance that led to a civil war that by the end had taken hundreds of thousands of lives.
In the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction, particularly from the late 1870s onward, that the Southern slavocracy was transformed into a form of corporatocracy, with the Democratic Party serving as its political vehicle. This shift maintained key economic and social structures of the pre-war South under a new guise, and the free trade paradigm once championed by the slavocracy found a parallel in the corporatocracy’s agenda. To be sure, the end of slavery in 1865 dismantled the plantation system’s foundation of chattel slavery, but the Southern elite—former slaveholders and their allies—adapted by leveraging sharecropping, tenant farming, and debt peonage to bind freed black laborers (and poor whites) to the land in conditions eerily reminiscent of servitude. Simultaneously, they courted foreign capital to rebuild the region’s economy, often on terms that preserved their dominance, giving rise to a corporate-influenced power structure.
This history must be recognized and emphasized: this corporatocracy, dubbed the “New South” by its boosters, e.g., Henry Grady, saw the Democratic Party as its champion. The party, having regained control of Southern state governments during Redemption, aligned with emerging corporate interests—mining, railroads, textiles, and timber—while maintaining the agrarian elite’s influence. The free trade stance of the antebellum slavocracy, which prioritized exporting cotton to Europe and importing cheap goods, was not carried over the corporatocracy but was an imperative of globalism.
This explains why Democrats continued to oppose high tariffs, arguing they hurt agricultural exports still vital to the region’s economy and raised costs for manufactured goods supplied by foreign firms setting up in the South, as well as those from abroad. The Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act of 1894, passed under Democratic President Grover Cleveland, lowered tariffs significantly, reflecting the continuity of interests. This stance benefited both the agrarian elite and the new corporate players, like textile magnates, who wanted cheap inputs and access to global markets.
The parallels are striking. Just as the slavocracy relied on Europe to sustain its cotton empire, the corporatocracy sought to integrate the South into a global economy where it remained a supplier of raw materials (coal, cotton, and lumber) and a low-wage labor pool, rather than a hub of industrial innovation. Historian C. Vann Woodward argues that this reconstituted system kept the South economically dependent—now on corporate interests as much as on foreign markets—perpetuating underdevelopment akin to dependency theory’s critique.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industries like textiles, tobacco, and later manufacturing began to grow. Northern corporations, along with some foreign investors, saw the region as a potential source for profit. The South had a historically low rate of unionization compared to the industrialized North. This was partly due to the region’s agricultural roots and racial divisions that undermined worker solidarity by pitting white workers against black workers. State governments passed “right-to-work” laws and other anti-union legislation, making it harder for unions to organize. With fewer unions to negotiate better pay, Southern workers—both white and black—were paid significantly less than their Northern counterparts. Corporations established factories or mills in the South and keep labor costs down, maximizing surplus value. Northern companies, such as textile manufacturers, moved operations south to exploit cheap labor, as well as abundant and cheap raw materials.
By the early twentieth century, New England textile firms began relocating to states like North Carolina and South Carolina, where they faced little resistance from organized labor. Northern investors funded mills that employed entire families, including children, at wages far below Northern standards. By the 1930s, efforts to unionize Southern workers—like the General Textile Strike of 1934—met fierce resistance from both companies and local governments, often with violent crackdowns. Moreover, foreign corporations—especially in the post-World War II era—also tapped into the South’s low-union environment. Automakers like BMW (in South Carolina) and Nissan (in Tennessee) set up plants in the region, drawn by tax incentives, cheap labor, and a business-friendly climate with minimal union presence.
Thus, the Democratic Party’s dominance in the South, bolstered by disenfranchisement of black voters via Jim Crow laws, ensured this corporatocracy faced little political challenge, entrenching a free trade paradigm that echoed the slavocracy’s earlier goals. While early on the South industrialized to some extent (e.g., Birmingham’s steel industry), it did so unevenly, often as an appendage to foreign firms, overtime it became a production hub for the global economy. Its function as an export processing zone in an advanced industrial nation does not negate that fact but reinforces the point that the post-war power structure was less a break from the past than a reconfiguration of its dependent, extractive essence.
The connection between Southern Democrats and Northern Democrats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly around a progressive transnationalist and culturally pluralist politics, topics I have written about extensively, represents a complex intersection of economic, ideology, and regional interests. It might strike observers as odd than such a political coalition was possible, but it is a fact of American history. While Southern Democrats were often associated with the conservative, agrarian corporatocracy that emerged post-Reconstruction, Northern Democrats—especially urban intellectuals and political machines—pushed a more progressive agenda that embraced cultural pluralism, globalist integration, and mass immigration. This unseemly coalition endured for decades, a fact that betrays the common interests: transnationalization of corporate power.
Horace Kallen, a philosopher and proponent of cultural pluralism, a man I have described in previous articles as an organic intellectual of the corporate class, exemplifies this Northern strain of thinking, advocating for a situation where diverse immigrant groups retained their identities within a unified American framework—an obvious impossibility that revealed the intent of the project: to divide the working class. Kallen’s vision aligned with a transnationalist outlook that saw the US as part of an interconnected global economy, indeed even world society, a stance that found synergy with Southern Democratic priorities despite their differing sociocultural bases.
Southern Democrats, rooted in the free trade legacy of the slavocracy and corporatocracy, supported policies that facilitated global economic ties—access to cheap labor, low tariffs, and open markets—which dovetailed with Northern Democrats’ embrace of mass immigration as a driver of industrial growth. Both sought to undermine the strength of labor. In the South, the post-war economy increasingly relied on exploiting black labor through sharecropping and later attracting foreign investment, while Northern industrial cities—Chicago and New York—depended on waves of European immigrants to fuel factories, railroads, and urban expansion.
Kallen’s 1915 essay “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot” rejected assimilationist pressures coming from the native working class, arguing instead for a pluralist society that could absorb diverse groups—a view that resonated with Democratic urban machines (e.g., Tammany Hall) that courted immigrant votes. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Progressive transnationalism found common ground with Southern Democrats’ globalism, as both saw benefits in an open, interconnected world: the South exported raw materials produced by superexploited labor, while the North imported foreign labor and capital. The Democratic Party thus became a coalition where Southern free trade advocates and Northern pluralists coexisted.
To be sure, there were tensions. Southern Democrats often resisted the cultural implications of immigration, clinging to white supremacy and opposing Northern-style diversity in their own region, yet they supported the broader economic framework that mass immigration enabled. But even here, there were more direct sympathies. For instance, during the late nineteenth century, Senator John Morgan of Alabama pushed for Chinese immigration to the South as a labor solution post-slavery, reflecting a pragmatic globalist streak despite racial anxieties.
This alliance peaked in figures like Woodrow Wilson, a Southern-born Democrat who, as president, blended Southern economic priorities, e.g., lowering tariffs via the Underwood Tariff of 1913, and even embracing segregation, with Northern progressive rhetoric, including support for immigrant-heavy urban constituencies. Remember, Wilson advocated for the forerunner of the United Nations, what he envisioned as a League of Nations. This aligned with the technocratic vision of Henri de Saint-Simon, who advanced the idea of a global council or federation of nations dedicated to fostering global cooperation.
Again, the connection wasn’t seamless—Southern Democrats’ racism clashed with Northern pluralism—but their shared a commitment to a globalist integration bridged the gap. Kallen’s ideas, while more intellectual than policy-driven, influenced Democratic rhetoric about America’s role in a pluralistic, interconnected world, complementing the South’s practical push for free trade and labor mobility.
This uneasy partnership shaped the party’s identity, advancing a transnationalist vision that balanced Southern economic dependency with Northern progressive ideals. Popular backlash, e.g., the 1924 Immigration Act, put the project, at least in part, on hold for several decades, but the 1960s would remove that barrier, in the process freeing the South of its racial commitments and prepared it for embracing the future return to populism by the Republican Party.
The Parties did not flip because Republicans appealed white supremacy. The Democratic Party didn’t change at all in its fundamental commitment to identity politics and globalization. And the Republican Party? After decades in the wilderness, where it at times merged with the interests animating the Democratic Party (the “Uniparty,” some have called it), the Republican Party eventually reclaimed the spirit that had called it into existence in the 1850s, a spirit that was born in 1776—and it found a willing base in the South among those who desired limited government, personal freedom, and strong communities and families.
A question Marxists like to ask is “What is to be done?” Staying with the analytical framework of this essay, dependency theorists advocate for “delinking” (think “decoupling”) as a strategy to break the cycle of underdevelopment and foster endogenous (internally driven) production. Delinking refers to reducing or severing economic dependence on the global core—wealthier, industrialized nations—by minimizing reliance on their capital, manufactured goods, and markets. The idea is that peripheral countries can redirect their resources and labor toward self-sustaining development, prioritizing domestic industries and local needs over export-oriented production of primary commodities and dependence on cheap imported goods.
Amin stresses that delinking doesn’t mean complete autarky or isolation but rather a strategic reorientation of economic policies to build national or regional autonomy. For example, instead of exporting raw materials to be processed abroad, a delinking approach might involve investing in local manufacturing to add value domestically, retaining profits and skills within the country. Prebisch’s push for import-substitution industrialization (ISI)—where nations produce goods they previously imported—aligns with Amin’s, aiming to bolster endogenous production and reduce unequal trade relationships.
Critics note that delinking can face challenges like limited capital, technological gaps, or retaliation from core countries, but these are problems to overcome with a national economic strategy, the solutions essential for escaping the structural trap of dependency.
In the modern era of globalization, parallels to dependency theory can indeed be observed in the United States, though, as expected, they manifest differently from the classic core-periphery dynamics of the theory’s original focus on the Global South. The US is a core nation, driving global capitalism through economic and technological development, as well as via military dominance. However, certain external and internal relationships are fraught with dependency-like patterns that echo the “development of underdevelopment” and raise questions about the potential relevance of delinking—even for a superpower.
Internally, regions within the US—such as parts of the rural South or the deindustrialized Rust Belt—exhibit characteristics of peripheral economies. These areas continue to rely on exporting raw or minimally processed goods or stand ready as low-wage labor pools for transnational corporations, while advanced production and wealth accumulation are concentrated in urban coastal hubs such Silicon Valley. Globalization has amplified this, with corporations outsourcing manufacturing to countries like China or Mexico, leaving behind communities dependent on volatile commodity markets or service jobs without fostering endogenous industrial capacity—service jobs that are themselves increasingly automated and outsourced. These developments mirror dependency theory’s critique of surplus extraction, where local economies stagnate as profits flow to corporate headquarters or foreign investors rather than being reinvested locally.
Externally (admittedly, the internal and external blur amid globalization), the US itself has become dependent on global supply chains, particularly for critical resources like rare earth minerals, electronics, manufactured goods, and pharmaceuticals, much of which are controlled by countries like China, which leave the US vulnerable during military conflicts, global pandemics, and trade wars.
This reliance parallels the periphery’s historical dependence on the core, albeit inverted in this way: the US exports capital and imports finished products, ceding industrial autonomy. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, shortages of medical supplies highlighted how decades of offshoring production left the US vulnerable, prompting calls for “delinking” strategies, such as reshoring manufacturing to bolster endogenous production. Policies like the CHIPS Act and tariffs on Chinese goods reflect this shift, aiming to reduce reliance on foreign industry and rebuild domestic capacity—echoing Prebisch’s import-substitution logic.
However, the US context diverges from classic dependency theory because its global dominance allows it to shape the rules of globalization, unlike peripheral nations—if Democrats get out of the way and let Donald Trump and his team restructure the global economy.
America’s financial power, e.g., the dollar’s reserve currency status, and consumer market (which is vast and still relatively affluent, albeit with historic levels of debt accumulation) give it leverage that weaker countries lack. Still, the parallels lie in the risks of over-reliance on external systems and the uneven development within its borders. Delinking, in the American case, means prioritizing national or regional self-sufficiency over unfettered global integration, complicated by the US’s role as a globalization architect and the interdependence of modern economies. I have been for decades calling the US to quit its globalization efforts and end its interdependence with other nations when those relations make America vulnerable.
Although it is not a perfect fit, dependency theory offers a valuable lens to critique how globalization can undermine even a core nation’s sovereignty and equitable development. Indeed, it is a valuable lens through which to understand Trump’s restructuring of the global trade system to counteract the managed decline of the American Republic.
In dependency theory terms, the US under Trump’s trade policies can be seen as a nation undergoing peripheralization clawing its way out of a subordinated role in the global capitalist order. To be sure, the US is still a superpower, which makes this application feel unorthodox, but taking the long view, we can see the outcome of the managed decline of the American Republic—and the American people must learn long-term thinking if they want to maintain superpower status. The reality is that the US has shifted from being the industrial core post-WWII to outsourcing manufacturing to cheaper labor pools in places like China and Mexico over decades of globalization.
This deindustrialization mirrors the “development of underdevelopment” I have been describing, where the Global North’s prosperity (in this case, corporate profits) relied on hollowing out its own industrial base, leaving behind Rust Belt towns and a reliance on imported goods—akin to a periphery exporting raw materials (in this case, capital and demand) while losing control of production. Trump’s tariffs, especially the ten percent universal rate and the massive 125 percent rate on China, is something akin to a Prebisch-style import-substitution push: disrupt the unequal trade relationships that locked the US into buying finished goods from abroad and force a reorientation toward domestic production.
The application of the dependency model to the current situation is messy. Dependency theory assumes a clear core-periphery divide, with the Global North exploiting the South’s resources and labor. Trump’s gambit targets both the Global South (via broad tariffs) and nations in the Global North, as well as a core rival like China—while still operating from a position of economic and military dominance. The ninety-day tariff pause and negotiations with over 75 countries suggest he’s not just breaking dependency but also reasserting control over the terms of global trade.
Amin might see as a core power flexing to maintain hegemony rather than a periphery escaping exploitation. Today, the US isn’t fully peripheral, but its deindustrialized state echoes the surplus extraction Frank and others highlighted, with wealth flowing to multinational and transnational corporations and foreign manufacturers. The market’s wild swings reveal the tension: capital wants unfettered globalization, but Trump’s restructuring risks short-term chaos to shift the US back toward self-reliance. At the very least, he seeks a less trade-dependent posture. Whether this reverses the cycle of underdevelopment depends on if those tariffs stick and spark real reindustrialization. This is why it is important to play the long game.
A ten percent universal tariff that remains in place is not insignificant, and Trump’s announcement to temporarily drop tariff rates to that rate, while excluding China, for ninety days represents a notable shift in trade policy. The pause scales back from the steeper reciprocal tariffs he initially imposed on nearly ninety nations, ranging from eleven percent to fifty percent. The reciprocal tariffs were designed to bring those other nations to the table to negotiate a reduction on their tariff (and other) barriers to United States goods and services—and nations are coming to the table. The pause is in part a response to market turmoil, but it is also in response to pressure from over seventy-five countries reaching out to negotiate, and that pressure was an instigated response by the Trump policy.
The ninety-day window suggests Trump’s playing a strategic game—keeping pressure on while giving room for talks. Most countries get this breather, but China’s getting hammered with a 125 percent rate. The economic plan is obvious at this point and it is clearly also a foreign policy move that justifies the emergency use of the economic weapon of tariffs, doubling down on China, which has ruthlessly moved to take over global supply chains, goaded Xi into overcommitting on retaliatory tariffs. In Chinese culture, particularly the hard core of the Communist Party. Xi can’t lose face, so he is likely to push China’s already faltering economy into crisis to save face. Thus America’s chief superpower rival is weakened. It is also marginalized, as negotiations with other nations around world isolate China.
This occurs at the same time Trump seeks rapprochement with Russia, thus further separating nuclear powers on the Eurasian landmass. Trump’s belligerence towards Panama and Greenland had marginalizing China at its core. If negotiations on reciprocal tariffs falter by early July, those higher rates could return. It’s a calculated gamble, to be sure, but enough to push foreign governments to the table. The strategy so far has not cratered the US economy as the globalists predicted. Not even close. It puts the United States in the driver’s seat and the rest of the world in a defense position that requires them to lower their tariffs on American businesses, thus making the United States an attractive country for reshoring and foreign investment
Putting aside the hardcore lefties with their Maoist sympathies, to all the lefties who oppose totalitarian state socialism, particularly those who embraced dependency theory a quarter of a century ago, what happened to them? Can they not see that the agenda of the Trump administration comes as close—as messy as it is—to the agenda dependency theorists advanced decades ago as it can at this moment in the historical development of the world capitalist system—the agenda they advanced decades ago? Not even decades ago. Remember in 2015 when Bernie Sanders decried open borders as a Koch brothers scheme to undermine American workers? Open borders stand alongside offshoring as a key component of globalization. Now none other than Charles Koch himself (and all his stalworth allies) is suing the Trump administration over tariffs. Where is the left? Why aren’t they supporting Trump?
For that matter, given that the Republican Party was formed by pro-labor and even socialist activists and intellectuals, why is the left not allied with the Republican Party? Is it because Republicans are a bourgeois party? Reality check: world socialism is not in our future. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out several years ago, capitalism has more work to do.
Recall Karl Marx’s words from the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.” Marx’s point here is that revolutionary change, in the case the overthrow of capitalism, won’t happen until the system has fully played out its potential and contradictions ripen the conditions for a new order. Marx is not saying revolution is impossible until conditions are “perfect,” but rather that a truly lasting epochal transformation emerges organically when the status quo can no longer contain the contradictions that inhere in its developmental dynamic.
The choice of the left now and for the foreseeable future is not between capitalism and socialism but between two capitalisms: whether we will keep the international system of market capitalist nations led by the United States, its example of democratic-republic principle manifest in the US Constitution and the liberal freedoms enshrined in its Bill of Rights shining on the world, or a global corporatist system in which a transnational elite usurp the nation state and subordinate free people to a post-capitalist dystopia where individual liberties and popular politics are canceled.
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which occurs on the heels of capitalism’s consolidation, established a framework of international relations that is foundational to the modern nation-state and the principle of national sovereignty. The treaties signed in the peace set a precedent for a world order based on independent, sovereign states, each with the right to govern itself without outside interference.
At its core, the Westphalian system introduced these principles: sovereignty, where states have supreme authority within their own borders, free from external meddling; territorial integrity, where borders matter and states are defined by their geography, not just their rulers or religion; and equality of states, where, at least in theory, every state, big or small, gets the same legal standing (albeit power dynamics bend that in practice). Historically this arrangement marked a shift from the medieval patchwork of overlapping loyalties—feudal lords, the Church, and empires—to a cleaner map of distinct nations. To be sure, it has not been perfect. It didn’t stop wars. And colonialism later subjugated half the world. But it remains the backbone of international law. We came through wars. And we ended colonialism in its original form. The system is now under strain from globalization, in many ways a reconstituted colonialism, not by core powers, but by a transnational elite. Class struggle remains, but it is more than that. We are facing a new form of empire—one that is planetary in its character.
Globalization is eroding the Westphalian principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity by elevating a transnational elite— global financial institutions, multinational corporations, supranational bodies such as the IMF and the WTO or IMF—that effectively overrides national authority. I have (along with others) described this as a “neofeudalism” that mirrors medieval power structures, where a small, interconnected elite, hold sway over fragmented, less autonomous regions, dividing the world’s population into estates. Here is it bankers, CEOs, and technocrats instead of lords and clerics. In a Westphalian world, states determine matters within their borders and use diplomacy to defend the interests of their people; under globalization, capital flows and offshore supply chains dictate terms, in the long term breaking apart nations and reducing their regions to vassals of a borderless economic order.
The visions of the future presented by the two major parties governing the American polity could not be starker. Those who say there is no real difference between Democrats and Republicans could not be more wrong. To be sure, the parties have aligned from time to time. After all they have to represent to some extent popular opinion, even if that opinion is shaped and manipulated. But the differences between parties concerning the fate of the American Republic are fundamentally different. The ends sought are entirely incompatible. The choice is clear to those who believe in the modern nation-state and national sovereignty.
The Democratic Party is the party of transnational corporate capitalism. The push for global free trade is in their DNA. So is the desire for a technocratic form of administrative rule that sees citizens not as sovereign but as subjects to be made dependent on big intrusive government. The persistence of identity politics, especially along the lines of race, and the deconstruction of the family and the community, throughout the history of the party exposes the tactic of fracturing the working class to obtain these ends. The Republican Party at its inception, and in its reclamation in the present day, whatever its flaws and deviations, represents the vision that gave the world the American Republic. This is not a rightwing vision, but a vision that cuts across ideological lines.
freedom and reason 