Cheapness and Nationalism are mutually exclusive policy goals

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I voted today in Connecticut, and on the ballot there was this guy named Robert Finley Hyde running for Senate as on the “Cheaper Gas Groceries Party.” Cheap. We love cheap, and everyone complains about expensive shit. But the truth of cheapness has been obscured by our politics for most of my lifetime.

If you take nothing away from this post, remember this: nationalism and cheapness are mutually exclusive policy goals. Capitalism is really good at making everything really cheap for the nations on top. In their book “A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things,” Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore basically argue that making things cheap is the whole purpose of capitalism. They’re not wrong. But the way our politics talks about cheapness has baffled me for years. I also think this discourse generally benefits Republicans. Here’s why.

From the point of view of the United States, the way you make things cheap is to import consumer products from elsewhere that are made by cheap labor. This means globalism. Cheapness and globalism are synonyms. Again, that’s the whole point of global capitalism. And this cheapness is further enhanced by a stable set of agreements between corporations and nations. War fucks this up and makes things more expensive. So does climate change. Cheapness is a function of clear expectations.

This is to say, you cannot be a nationalist and pro-cheap things. This is the sleight of hand that the (new) Republicans have gotten away with for years. We can do the paleoconservative thing, sure—be more ethno-nationalist, removed, blocked off, tariffed, whatever…but everything is going to get more expensive. Again, if you’re committed to the project of nationalism in this way, that’s fine, but don’t talk about making things cheap. For various reasons, I actually do think that renationalizing and relocalizing supply chains is, indeed, a good idea and will be necessary to take climate change seriously. But it will not make things cheaper.

The sincere thing that folks like Trump and Vance should say is that they want to renationalize everything and that this will cost Americans a lot of money, sure, but it is worth it to protect our unique culture, heritage, and ourselves from the impending global instability precipitated by the uncertainty of climate change. Heck, isn’t this what Jesus was about? Fuck money! But they don’t. They lie, and say we can have it both ways: cheap and isolated. To his credit, having it both ways has been the logic of every venture Trump.

The truth here is that what it means to be a centrist in the United States (aka, most of the Democrats at this point) is that getting more cheap shit (including cheap jobs) to more Americans is priority number one. That’s the whole platform, and they’re really good at it. The Biden-Harris administration has been historically good for the US economy. No surprise. And, sure, this orientation toward politics is destroying the livelihoods of Americans, relies on invisible slave labor elsewhere, and is fundamentally the kind of politics that is destroying the planet as well.

But the point of this post isn’t to say that making things cheap is good. It is just to say that the Republicans, and certainly Trump and Vance, are not the party of cheap. For instance, Trump’s proposed China tariffs are a good idea if you are sort of racist toward the Chinese and want to punish them, but they are not good if you want to keep prices low for everyday Americans. I think a lot of the general voting public gets this severely confused, including Democrats. It seems today that often Republican voters are voting for policies they think will lower the price of eggs, but that actually do the exact opposite. Meanwhile, the Democratic base believes they’re voting for policies that build a more sustainable and equitable economy, but they frequently do the exact opposite and indeed exacerbate climate change.

Let’s see if I can sum this up.

Cheapness, a core function of global capitalism, depends on globalism and stable international agreements, making it incompatible with nationalist policies. While Republicans often promote a nationalist agenda, which includes tariffs and isolationism, these policies will inevitably make things more expensive. Meanwhile, centrist Democrats focus on expanding access to cheap goods and jobs, which is economically successful but also exacerbates global inequalities and environmental degradation. For decades, both parties have proposed an unachievable agenda. On one hand, the Republicans want to nationalize to make things cheap. On the other hand, Democrats want to globalize and make things of higher quality, healthier, sustainable, whatever.

Feel free to disagree in the comments!