Illiberal leaders naturally transform economies into exclusively patrimonial regimes in which employment is made artificially scarce, allowing the population to be politically manipulated thru direct control over said employment. That’s how its worked in the Balkans for decades.
Yet this is precisely the model Trump is introducing in piecemeal fashion in the US, famed for its storied love of “free markets & free people”, & the collective biz establishment is silent. Self-dealing, family hires, targeting “opposition” corps, trade wars — step by step.
This is what you call the political-economy of authoritarianism. This is the economic foundation for non-democratic regimes; if not immediately, then one that will become so in time, thanks in large part to the success of such policies.
And obvs there’s always “patriotic” businesses that side w such regimes, betting they can profit from their ties to the powers-that-be. Croatia, an EU & NATO state, is on the brink of economic catastrophe thx to one such patriotic CEO, Ivica Todorić. But they’re symptoms.
The issue is the political actors who create economic regimes which depend on such patrimonial practices. And while some aspects of this have been present for decades, Trump’s policies are clearly a determined acceleration twds patrimonialism, cronyism, corruption as norms.
This should be no great insight but it needs to be explicated as the dominant discourse re the WH’s econ/trade policy is that it’s “foolish”. It’s not foolish if your objective is to create politically-powerful dependency structures. And that’s precisely what he’s doing. /xxx
