Are YOU addicted to copium?

In recent weeks, as the US president’s deranged economic strategy has unfolded, the irrigation channels of progressive politics and punditry have been awash with copium. The way some of America’s most influential liberals tell it, Trump has already blown it, only two months into his second presidency, and MAGA is hurtling towards the scrap-heap of history. It’ll all be over soon enough.

At the heart of this dubious contention is the mantra coined by James Carville in 1992 when he was running Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign: “The economy, stupid” (a slogan which, after more than three decades of over-use, has acquired a prefatory “It’s…”). 

There were, in fact, two other elements in Carville’s original “haiku”: “Change v more of the same” and “Don’t forget healthcare”. But his line about the economy has lodged itself in legend because it suited, and still suits, those who are determined to see politics as no more than a branch of economics; those who reduce the voter to homo economicus, and approach the world as though economic statistics were the only reality worth bothering with, and humanity just the bubble-wrap in which that data is encased.

Trump’s capricious stop-go approach to tariffs and his striking refusal to rule out a recession have indeed spooked the markets, alarmed investors and dampened his poll numbers. What he airily referred to in his speech to a joint session of Congress on March 4 as “a little disturbance” is already closer to a glowering storm.

Last Thursday, the S&P 500 – the world’s most influential stock-market benchmark – slid into a so-called “correction”, the market term applied when an index falls by more than 10% from its peak (reached, in this instance, less than a month before). According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published last week, 57% of US voters think Trump’s trade policy is too erratic and 70% expect the price of groceries and other goods to rise.

Alas, the mighty Carville himself has responded with something approaching triumphalism. As early as February 21, he told Dan Abrams on SiriusXM: “We’re in the middle of a collapse. It’s over.”

In an essay for the New York Times four days later, he urged Democrats to “roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us… It won’t take long.”

On March 12, Pod Save America host Dan Pfeiffer declared in his newsletter: “Seven weeks into his presidency, Trump is being hoisted on (sic) his own petard… His entire agenda is now at risk because of the economy.”

The following day, Jared Bernstein, the former chair of Joe Biden’s council of economic advisers, advanced a similar argument for The Contrarian, under the headline: “How Trump’s reckless economic agenda united the country”.

To be clear: I think the president’s economic plan (if that is the word) is positively demented. There is much talk of an alleged “Mar-a-Lago Accord” that gives coherence to what he is doing, supposedly crafted by Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, and Stephen Miran, recently confirmed as chair of Trump’s council of economic advisers.

Those with a taste for the hard stuff should consult Miran’s 41-page paper for Hudson Bay Capital, posted online in November, “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System”. 

Broadly speaking, what he and Bessent appear to want is a new mercantilism: namely a nationalist economic policy that maximises exports, minimises imports, reindustrialises America, deploys tariffs judiciously and recalibrates the value of the dollar to help US manufacturers to sell overseas, without wrecking its status as the world’s reserve currency.

All of which might be more relevant were their boss not a certifiable maniac whose approach to economic measures – especially tariffs – barely deserves to be called “tactical”. Investors, much like geopolitical allies, depend upon stability and a degree of predictability. The chaos agent in the White House gives them precisely the opposite. 

According to Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, “Tariffs are a tax cut for the American people”. In practice, they are much more likely to increase prices, chill investment and damage retirement portfolios.

The terrible error that many progressives are already making is to assume that voters’ economic anxiety and anger will automatically translate into an electoral return to the Democratic fold. Less than five months since Trump’s extraordinary victory – matched in both houses of Congress – his opponents are already writing his political obituary. As I say: it is terrible what copium can do to otherwise intelligent people.

How much evidence is required to show that economic determinism is a ludicrous creed? Of course the emotions stirred in voters by their economic experience, grievance and anxiety are an essential component of electoral behaviour. It would be idle to suggest otherwise. But the assumption that – when all is said and done – the price of eggs is all that counts is stunningly misguided and politically illiterate.

The recent history of this country is evidence enough. As long ago as January 2014, Nigel Farage identified the argument that would make Brexit happen: “If you said to me, would I like to see over the next 10 years a further five million people come into Britain and if that happened we’d all be slightly richer, I’d say I’d rather we weren’t slightly richer”. 

In 2016, in the face of dire warnings of economic pain, more than half of British voters indicated that they shared this sentiment (among others). By December 2019, it was absolutely clear that leaving the European Union came with a heavy national price-tag. The electorate duly rewarded the Conservatives’ campaign promise to “Get Brexit Done” with a landslide victory.

If economic determinism were a sound behavioural compass, president Kamala Harris would even now be looking back on her first two months in the Oval Office. Yes, grocery prices were still higher than voters would have liked on polling day in November. But, overall, the economic record of the Biden-Harris administration was remarkable.

Inheriting the scars of the pandemic, it oversaw 48 consecutive months of increased employment; during the last two years of the Biden presidency, the S&P 500 posted its first consecutive annual gains of more than 20% since the late 1990s. Between June 2022 and November 2024, inflation fell from 7.2% to 2.4%. Between November 2023 and November 2024, the price of groceries increased by only 1.4%. Best of all, inflation was tamed without a recession – and wages grew faster than prices.

So how did the voters reward this economic performance? By re-electing a convicted felon, twice impeached, found liable by jury for sexual abuse; a disgraced former president who argued that Covid could be treated by the injection of bleach and was spared a stretch in prison for his part in the insurrection of January 6 only by victory on November 5 (“the one final verdict”, as he saw it).

This is why the present glee of so many liberal commentators is positively irresponsible. Yes, Trump is in a fix. More to the point, so is the US economy unless he restrains his manic inclination to use tariffs – like military aid and intelligence – as a tool of global intimidation. And since when does this president exercise restraint?

And yes: all of this economic mayhem might be of significant help to the Democrats in the 2026 mid-terms and even in the presidential race of 2028. But – this is the extremely simple and extremely important bit – it might not.

The copium carnival of the last few weeks epitomises one of the worst features of the progressive mentality: the expectation that, in due course and as a matter of historic inevitability, the voters will invariably wake up to liberal rectitude, acknowledge how wrong they were to back the other team, and perhaps even apologise tearfully to those whom Thomas Sowell so accurately describes as “the anointed”. Even at this low ebb, too many Democrats feel a Brechtian resentment at the misguidedness of the electorate that is greater than their readiness to learn from their own disastrous failure.

The only certainty about hypermodern politics is radical volatility and indeterminacy. In this sense we have left behind the world in which the Newtonian model – deterministic, mechanistic principles; predictable, consistent political responses to identifiable forces; an alleged pendulum in democratic life – was a useful guide to politics. 

Today, quantum theory, with its indeterminacy, complementarity (multiple descriptions of reality can coexist), entanglement and fission, is a much better compass to a politics of warp-speed unpredictability.

I somehow doubt that Trump is a disciple of Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and Max Born (though he probably thinks they are all “doing a phenomenal job with Elon”). But his sheer volatility and shallowness of principle equip him well for this radically new context.

Liberals, in sharp contrast, are disproportionately susceptible to what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls the “narrative fallacy”: whereby the imperfect stories of the past shape our expectations of the future. 

In his classic book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) the late Daniel Kahneman wrote of the same failure of collective imagination: “The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.”

Instead of adapting to Trump and recognising his preternatural resilience, too many progressives expect normality – whatever that now means – to reassert itself; in spite of everything, they believe that there will be a great awakening, a falling of the scales from hundreds of millions of eyes.

Instead, they should be asking what is still by far the most important political question in the world today: why did the voters want him back? Why, knowing precisely what he is like and what he was proposing to do, did they, astonishingly, grant him a second chance?

Copium is a way of deferring this difficult reckoning. It requires nothing of its dealers or consumers than to signal their virtue, their faux-confidence that the madness will soon be over and their equally bogus insistence that a resumption of business as usual is at hand. Copium merchants posture as bearers of great news and instigators of action. But what they are really selling is the same old smugness.

If this sounds harsh, it is meant to. As the international world order falls apart, populism surges and nativism entrenches itself all over the world, this is no time for progressives to seek refuge in a feelgood fantasia. 

The most contemptible feature of copium is that it prioritises individual and tribal peace of mind over the common good. It makes vindication – we were right all along – seem more important than meaningful success, and all the hard work that entails. 

“I told you I was brilliant” is not a defensible response to recent electoral catastrophe or a basis for planning political recovery.

We can see how Trump will counterattack on the economy. All failures – all scarcity – will be blamed on the “deep state”, on migrants, on wokery and environmental regulation, on the “globalists” who seek to sabotage American greatness, and (above all) on Biden. Already, Fox News and other right wing platforms are warning of the “Biden recession”. Trump has an intuitive genius for recrimination. When things go wrong, the buck stops anywhere but with him.

I don’t know how it will end, and neither do you. But it troubles me to see so many intelligent liberals chewing copium, taking the edge off their innermost fears, waiting for the great political machine to correct itself. 

What none of them has realised is that the machine in question was destroyed years ago; and that the drug they are dependent on is nothing but a cheap hallucinogen.