The grift bubble

The always interesting Timothy Snyder has some thoughts on what he calls the “grift bubble:”

Imagine that you are a first-rate grifter: the president of the United States, say. Your grift is that you pretend to be a successful businessman, and use that supposed expertise to make your case for the presidency, which office you then use to make money. Or imagine instead that you are the vice-president. Your grift is that you claim to understand poor people, whose problems, you say, are the fault of gays, immigrants, and billionaires; and then you rise to power thanks to the money and support of a gay immigrant billionaire.

Given that these are their shticks, and that they have worked, you can see how Trump and Vance might conclude that Americans are gullible and that all things are possible.

The initial claim, the wild lie, is like the air the gets a balloon started: Trump is a rich person; Vance cares about the poor people. The big lies work! And then there is more lying, more hot air, a growing space, a sense of comfort, a safe space for fascist oligarchy.

You grift on and you grift on, and the bubble just gets bigger. It seems like you know everything that you need to know, and that the grift, the graft, and the gruffety-gruff can go on forever. When you have lived for a long time inside a grift bubble, you think you have seen it all, but this is not the case. From inside a grift bubble, you do not see the outside.

You do not grasp that your grift actually depends upon something larger, something better, which it is sapping, weakening, bringing to ruin. . . .

You can take away what belongs to people without knowing how they achieved or attained it. The guy who cheats the farmer at the county fair does not know how to farm. The guy who profits from curated crypto scams does not understand the world economy.

Trump and Vance imagine, because it has worked thus far, that they can grift endlessly. They do not understand that their grift depends upon what I will unashamedly call the honest labor and decent convictions of millions of Americans. Were there not Americans who actually worked and cared and tried to live right, there would be nothing and no one to grift. . . .

And so here we are. The bigger the grift bubble grows, the less healthy material remains beyond it. It sucks away what it productive. As personal connections become the basis of business, the economy slows. It sucks away what is ethical. As corruption comes to seem normal, citizens lose trust in one another. As basic institutions are scorned and destroyed, people cease to believe in the law. The material which builds a nation — moral, institutional, economic — starts to give way.

Snyder’s conclusion is that Trump’s “effort to create authoritarianism is more likely to lead to a breakup of the state than to a total regime change.”

Somebody in the comments mentioned Argentina the other day — another multi-ethnic country with enormous natural resources and lots of “human capital” to take advantage of all that wealth. Very few people are aware that Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world in the early 20th century: it had the 7th-highest per capita GDP of any nation at the time of World War I. It then spent decades destroying all that via terrible governments, including bouts of populist authoritarianism and military dictatorship, until the collapse of any faith in the public sphere had undermined almost all the country’s key institutions.

But of course that can’t happen to America, because [magical thinking goes here].