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The empire rebrands

Originally published: Naked Capitalism on March 2, 2025 by Conor Gallagher (more by Naked Capitalism) (Posted Mar 04, 2025)
Capitalism, Empire, Imperialism, InequalityAmericas, United StatesNewswire

There looks to be a lot of truth to this take:

So I’d like to make an attempt to cut through a lot of the noise and take a closer look at a question many seem to still be wrestling with: does the Trump 2.0 administration represent anything other than a rebranding of empire?

I do not believe it does, and that’s what I’ll argue here.

The larger rebrand underway is seeing elite “reconciliation” under Trump and plutocrats line up behind the repackaging from a “woke” empire to a more old-fashioned version focused on race, religion and more brazen exploitation. In the interests of keeping this post manageable, I’ll look at this on Wednesday and focus here solely on the transition form Biden’s “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class” to America First, how they complement one another, and how these narratives are nothing more than just that: stories used obfuscate the fact that policies are only concerned with further enriching American oligarchs and extending their ability to extract rent to every corner of the globe.

America’s “Enemies” Are the Reason You Can’t Pay the Bills

In many ways the Biden administration’s Foreign Policy for the Middle Class (FPMC) and Trump’s America First are similar. They both seek to present a veneer of solidarity with the U.S. working class through the scapegoating of foreign bogeymen for Americans’ ever declining standards of living. In reality those bogeymen have little to nothing to do with your $100,000 medical bill but they do always happen to be the enemies of American oligarchs.

While Team Biden still paid lip service to the human rights-democracy-feminism-LGTBQ tools of empire, they’ve largely worn out their usefulness. Trump discards these subtleties. Both are a might-is-right approach, but the latter is just the empire at its most honest.

Regardless, both are involved in the generation of narratives intended to obscure the fact that these evil countries are branded so because they resist the same oligarchic forces bleeding Americans dry. (This isn’t meant to romanticize these nations as they have their own issues with neoliberalism and oligarchy.)

Let’s start with Biden’s FPMC. National security advisor Jake Sullivan, largely credited with being the brain behind the failed tech war against China, also was the chief architect behind the narrative that wed a rebuilding of the American middle class with the Biden foreign policy. Here’s Politico back in 2020 describing Sullivan’s philosophy:

…the strength of U.S. foreign policy and national security lies primarily in a thriving American middle class, whose prosperity is endangered by the very transnational threats the Trump administration has sought to downplay or ignore.

That term “middle class” was a red flag from the start, as it has always been part of a project of making the working class disappear.

But it did try to lay blame for struggles of the aggrieved working class on nefarious foreign forces. Not decades of neoliberalism, not Biden yanking away Covid assistance, not the fact American life is a marketplace as opposed to a society. No, of course not. The real culprits are Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran and all those who refuse to bend the knee to Washington. If you must be angry at your lot in life, be angry with them, was the message of FPMC.

The two political parties in the U.S., which are unwilling to take on the plutocrats, are therefore forced to contrive these hackneyed sales pitches to the public, but the real campaigning is going on behind the scenes involving ideas on how the administration will expand the reach of American capital. This is evident in the actions of the Biden administration and the direction America First is already taking.

Let’s quickly review what Collective Biden did for the “middle class.”

A proxy war against Russia coupled with an effort to strangle China’s tech sector, thereby making sure the U.S. reigned supreme. After yanking away Covid assistance, Team Biden passed the CHIPS Act, which subsidizes semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S., and the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes billions for clean energy tech. And they threw in a genocide in Palestine for good measure. What were the results?

The end of Covid assistance decimated the working class. Project Ukraine has successfully walled off Europe from Russia but it’s been a military disaster for Ukraine and NATO. Russia has turned eastwards and looks to be only strengthened by the empire’s efforts to cripple it. China’s tech sector is doing fine and in the absence of Western imports it used to rely on is learning to make its own.

The IRA+CHIPS has invested $388 billion so far which has reportedly helped support 135,800 jobs in the U.S. That’s a small blip on the radar when considering the 3.7 million jobs sent to China from 2001 to 2018.

IRA+CHIPS

The CHIPS push has already stalled due to a shortage of qualified workers, and the fact remains that no matter what slogan the Biden, Trump, or next administration comes up with, it’s not going to bring back jobs that were offshored or remove the economic vise from most Americans without addressing the country’s advanced-stage neoliberalism. As Micahel Hudson writes:

[The US] has built too high a rentier overhead into its economy for its labor to be able to compete internationally, given the U.S. wage-earner’s budgetary demands to pay high and rising housing and education costs, debt service and health insurance, and for privatized infrastructure services.

And as James K. Galbraith writes, “The Biden economists had overlooked a fundamental fact, which is that the ultimate benefit of any “stimulative” policy flows to those with market power—to land and to capital—regardless of how it may be distributed at first.” That’s a fundamental fact conveniently “overlooked” by every administration.

Naturally, Biden’s FPMC of course did not help the “middle class.” Here are real wages:

IRA+CHIPS 2

And there is evidence that the majority of those miniscule gains are at the bottom for the working poor due to their need to sell their labor in unsafe Covid conditions.All other economic indicators–from credit card and medical debt to homelessness and economic inequality–continued their downward spirals under the “new FDR”:

So how about “America First”? Well, it’s still early, but the question is, as always: whose America–the working class or the financial vultures and Silicon Valley oligarchs bleeding the country dry? And will the Trump administration do anything other than make this fact worse: the U.S. wealth inequality is now on par with what it was on the eve of the Great Depression, which was the highest level in the country since its creation.

The Trump administration’s America First bullet points are here, but are broad, e.g.,

On the President’s direction, the State Department will have an America-First foreign policy.

A more detailed take is helpfully broken down here:

America First

As we can see from the administration’s actions so far, like with FPMC, an emphasis is placed in winning new global struggles and blaming others for Americans’ economic struggles.

There are ulterior motives in every case of blaming foreigners. Let’s take just a few examples.

  • China is responsible for the fentanyl. (Allows for more aggressive posture towards Beijing. More tariffs incoming.)
  • Whites are under attack in South Africa. (A pressure campaign on South Africa that targets a BRICS founding member and a location the U.S. desires a naval base in order to control shipping lanes and maintain naval dominance in order to contain China.)
  •  Muslim terrorists are on the march. (Let’s ethnically cleanse Palestine, increase presence in Somalia in fight over Red Sea and maximize pressure on Iran.)
  • Latinos stealing your jobs. (Militarize the border and provide testing ground for surveillance and population control tech but of course not go after the root of the problem: American companies that want cheap exploitable labor. )

This part of Trump’s appeal for the oligarchs: he’s fostered enough anger and assignment of blame for the deterioration of American lives to foreign actors and enemies at home that perhaps enough immigrants shipped off to Guantanamo and public shaming of DEI supporters can suffice while the looting of America can double its pace. Trouble is, the oligarchs envision a world in which everyone will become as vulnerable as the undocumented immigrant.

Blaming the foreign also helps enlist Americans in the fight against all these enemies around the world, including accepting propaganda like the idea that we must bow down at the altar of AI in order to win a race against the evil Chinese.

[AI] Arsenal of Democracy

As their FPMC floundered, Collective Biden was also busy redistributing an historic amount of wealth from the public to weapons companies–$1.3 trillion over four years–which Biden bragged about in his farewell address (military spending is set to soar higher under Trump). They resurrected talk of the “arsenal of democracy” to defend this. Probably best summed up by former Under Secretary of State and wrecker of worlds Victoria Nuland:

Collective Biden also tried to jumpstart the U.S. chip industry, which is necessary to “train” AI, while at the same time preventing advanced chips from getting into the hands of the bad guys in China.

Building on that, there are now calls under Trump-Musk for the U.S. to become the “AI Arsenal of Democracy.” What does that mean in practice? Here’s Jack Burnham, a research analyst in the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, providing a nice summary of the recommendations emerging from think tanklandia and Trump World these days:  

  • More export controls in an effort to restrict China’s access to certain technologies.
  • Separate the world into opposing AI blocs
  • ”Preparation to deploy and scale future private sector innovations that will further tilt the future balance of military and economic power in Washington’s favor.”
  • More data centers even if that “frustrates” housing and community development and federal lands for data center construction.

Of course. This last point highlights how these FPMC and America First divert energy and attention away from what John Maynard Keynes really advocated for (spending on social programs) and instead propagates the idea of “military Keynesianism.”

And the U.S. can’t even do that all that well anymore.  One problem that the Biden FPMC ran into was that the U.S. doesn’t even have the workforce anymore to build enough bombs to keep up with all those raining down on women and children in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and various other U.S. proxy wars.

It means that the Pentagon contracts General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems (a U.S. company) to build three 155mm projectile metal parts lines in Texas, but the company needs to call in Turkish subcontractors. As the Department of Defense itself notes, the “advanced weaponry and supporting equipment necessary to dominate in modern warfare require highly sophisticated manufacturing, yet the domestic workforce has suffered for decades.”

Maybe it’s a skills shortage, maybe people don’t want to make bombs, maybe they don’t want to work in a poorly ventilated factory during an ongoing pandemic, or maybe the jobs aren’t as attractive as they used to be. As Taylor Barnes points out,

…[the defense industry] dropped average salaries, and battered its unions in recent decades, meaning that, from a labor perspective, a job in the military-industrial complex just isn’t what it used to be.

That means the U.S. currently relies on components made in China for aircraft carriers and submarines. It means a trillion dollars in defense spending helps enrich China—the very country which is supposedly one of the points on an axis of evil behind the increased defense spending in the first place.

But that’s nothing that more neoliberalism can’t solve at the AI Arsenal. The Trump administration is now working on bringing in more “skilled” foreigners for the AI workforce. Trump already sided with Silicon Valley over his MAGA base in the H1B visa fight, and now we get this:

Much of the reporting on the “Gold Card” focused on the possibility that a bunch of wealthy people will flock to the U.S., but a closer look at the transcript reveals that’s not really what the order is designed for (wealthy could already buy their way into the U.S. anyways). Here’s Trump:

A person comes from India, China, Japan, lots of different places, and they go to Harvard, the Wharton School of Finance.  They go to Yale.  They go to all great schools.  And they graduate number one in their class, and they are made job offers, but the offer is immediately rescinded because you have no idea whether or not that person can stay in the country.  I want to be able to have that person stay in the country.

These companies can go and buy a gold card, and they can use it as a matter of recruitment.

So this is a tool for U.S. companies to bring in the workers needed for the AI Arsenal of Democracy. And what a democracy it will be. A bunch of hierarchical South Africans still stewing over criticism of their daddies for their role in apartheid recruiting for their hierarchical AI project.

AI and Monopoly “Guardrails” Vs. Government for AI and by AI

Let’s look at one noticeable shift.

If we must give the Biden administration any credit, it was the staffing at the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and Lina Khan and company at the Federal Trade Commission. And of course the plutocrats revolted. Even these minor protections for Americans were too much, and the shift of Silicon Valley money to overwhelming backing of Trump has at least been partially explained by the desire to punish Democrats for the Biden team’s gall at thinking it could regulate them.

It appears the issue of antitrust is still not completely settled in the Trump administration.

There are forces in the administration–represented by the JD Vance—Peter Thiel wing–that favor some level of enforcement. They see some monopolies–such as Google–as purely rent seekers. Others are useful when they create new products and help American capital spread its dominance around the world. Vance, Thiel, and the pronatalist movement want less economic burdens on Americans so they can produce more offspring for the civilizational war to come (and who knows, maybe more pristine blood for Thiel’s longevity?).

On the other side are venture capitalists like Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen who are more classic libertarians who want to abolish government and privatize some of its functions. They and others like Steve Bannon believe that almighty unfettered American capitalism won WWII (it’s an interesting thought exercise to imagine how the U.S. would have fared against Nazi Germany with no government intervention in the economy and without the USSR doing all the heavy lifting) and that any government interference would have lost the Cold War and will lose the New Not So Cold War. This ahistorical view ignores how the government has been foundational in almost every important modern tech advance.

But most of all, they believe people exist to provide them profit and be used as lab rats in their AI experiment. They don’t believe in a public commons and they don’t want any of their money touched for it.

The Biden administration’s modest proposals on antitrust, regulation of crypto and AI and taxing unrealized gains, were destroying the venture capital industry, according to Horowitz and Andreessen. And in their telling that means destroying America itself and condemning it to lose the New Cold War.

For them Trump is closer to Obama and Clinton than Biden and represents a great leap forward on the country’s neoliberal road to victory over labor and anyone in the world that oppose domination by American capital. Under Trump 2.0, all’s right with the Silicon Valley universe again:

The American elite are in almost universal agreement that their U.S. requires a powerful economy, technological supremacy, and a strong military. Any debate is largely over whether the government should do anything more than shovel money to self-declared geniuses in Silicon Valley and then get out of the way. One can see why the likes of Horowitz and Andreessen view this style of war capitalism as the key to American supremacy. As Malcolm Harris wrote in Palo Alto:

War Capitalism could put on a blindfold and run into a maze of horrific, absurd plans with confidence because it had class power echolocation for a guide: As long as the rich strengthened and the working class weakened, then things had to be going in the right direction. It didn’t matter that capitalists were investing in finance sugar highs, monopoly superprofits, and an international manufacturing race to the bottom rather than strong jobs and an expanded industrial base. The twenty-first century was going to be all about software anyway, baby. The robots will figure it out. Silicon Valley leaders sat on top of this world system like a cherry on a sundae, insulated from the melting foundation by a rich tower of cream.

It’s all so stupid, it would be funny if it weren’t going to be devastating for so many. Here’s just a brief summary, courtesy of Blood in the Machine, of America First’s embrace of Silicon Valley simply becoming the government:

But, stupid or not, it’s a powerful fiction. It joins the echelon of other AI projects helmed by Musk and his cohort, like the “AI-first strategy” DOGE is implementing, the government chatbots they’re building, and the systems designed to automatically remove pronouns and DEI verbiage from government websites. The very idea that DOGE’s AI can streamline and automate the government is already being used to justify the hollowing out and the reshaping of the federal workforce. Leaning into the reputation of generative AI, which has been touted as the so-powerful-it’s-terrifying future by Silicon Valley and the media, and into his meme-agency’s mission of locating efficiencies, Musk has sold his operation as the future, and he has done so emphatically enough that GOP is more than happy to run with the charade.

So we’re moving towards the automation of government on crappy hallucinatory AI, “AI coding agents” writing government software for different agencies and being trained in part on existing government contracts. Ai huckster termites are eating away at everything like the DOGE staffers at HUD who are from an AI real estate firm.

The goal appears to be a U.S. version of the neoliberal shock the U.S. directed at Russia in the 1990s, which led to a collapse of real wages and life expectancy worse than the U.S. Great Depression.

The U.S. capitalist system and those who run it are making great use of Trump. A large chunk of the population worships him and believe he’s leading a rethink in U.S. foreign policy and rooting out waste in government. The other half thinks he’s a moron controlled by Moscow. Silicon Valley is laughing all the way to the crypto bank.

But he has drawn Silicon Valley “effective accelerationists,” conservative and libertarian think tankers, and both financial and industrial capitalists to his side (which helps explain the deafening silence coming from Team Blue). The Democrats are now likely hoping for dissatisfaction among a faction of the oligarchs to arise.

If some plutocrats circle back to Team Blue, Democrats will be there waiting. They won’t roll back the great AI looting experiment, but they might provide a band aid for a flesh wound as they rebrand the same plutocratic policies under some new version of FPMC so the whole “world’s greatest democracy” show can go on.

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