The Man Who Believed in Nothing- Part III
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
“ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!” Trump recently posted on Truth Social, proclaiming victory with his new tariff policy. I’ve been telling you for several months that Herbert Spencer explains the present (if you haven’t read parts 1 and 2 of this series, they are accessible at the links in this parenthetical). That is clearer now than ever. The global economy faces an existential threat, and the people behind it are thinking like Herbert Spencer, and talking like some combination of him and Thanos/Skeletor/Sephiroth.
Now, Herbert Spencer hated tariffs, actually. Not inaccurately, he characterized them as theft from consumers by producers. It is counterintuitive to suggest Trump’s tariffs are either causally linked to or philosophically in the spirit of Spencerism. But they are. To understand how, we can turn to a potential contradiction in Spencer’s ideas– his views on war.
As I mentioned in part one, Spencer was generally against war. Spencer’s anti-militarism might seem confusing: why was a man so committed to an economic war of all against all hostile to actual war? He termed war, generally rightly, tyranny, and aggression. But he also used these terms for things like requiring companies to provide workers with protective equipment, or sanitation regulations. In Spencer’s view, these and other actions by the state are all a problem because they are driven by intention. We fight a war because we want to achieve some goal, some plan. Spencer did not believe in goals and plans.
The whole problem of politics, in Spencer’s view, and especially democratic politics, is that it gives us the resources and power to impose our designs on the world– when in a proper order, the world should impose its grand design on us. A war against Greenland today would be wrong, in his view, for the same reasons as a national healthcare plan, or the NATO mission to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia: each has a non-material should claim at its core, enforced by the state. Herbert Spencer’s worldview was defined by competition, but also by restriction. Proper competition is for and by individuals only. And it should be conducted based on impulse-driven adaptation, not intention.
Thus, Spencer’s political proposals envisioned a world of individuals with maximum personal freedom to consume and compete… surrounded by a police state that would brutalize them if they engaged in any theft, and a code of laws that if necessary would viciously suppress democratic demands for government regulation of anything.
In the 20th century, American conservatives and European economists drew on this blueprint to advance new right-wing visions of politics and economics. They called themselves “neoliberals,” arguing they were resurrecting the older “classical” liberalism from interventionists like President Roosevelt and his New Deal. I have an essay in the works for a magazine on them, and I cover it in a different way in chapter seven of my upcoming book Control Science (which will be published by Verso Books in May 2026! Stay tuned for pre-order details in a few months!), so I won’t say much at the moment. To be brief here, the neoliberals, like the man whose ideas they were drawing on, argued for profound competition. And like Spencer, they argued for it within a carefully-defined area meant to protect economic competition itself from the people. 20th-century neoliberals demanded free trade and unregulated commerce, and happily endorsed restrictions on democracy, up to and including dictatorship, to protect the market from the people.
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For an accessible analogy we can turn to Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games, in which children are forced by a dystopian state to fight to the death. What the state does is set the rules and kidnap the children. But in theory it doesn’t actually intervene! Once inside, competitors are free to achieve that goal however they would like.
In practice, capitalism never works like this. Merely setting up the arena is an intervention, and in both of the fictional works I cited, the state does in fact directly intervene in the competition. They have to: the competition itself is a product of specific political and economic conditions that must be reproduced. The Capitol (in Collins’s work) needs a spectacle to keep others in line, so it makes various interventions against its immediate rules of equal play in order to promote its outside-the-arena goal, political repression.
Likewise, at a certain point The Market is bound to purposes beyond itself. In the early 19th century, British capitalists had to be saved from themselves with factory regulation: they were devouring children enough to threaten the reproduction of society itself. If capitalists today do not eventually do something about climate change, they will suffer consequences, from the ecological to the political.
Just as the broader world can– and must– interfere with the competition inside the arena, the arena’s rules can break out of their confined space as well. A gladiator who retires after a career of killing might not live in the colosseum anymore, but his every habit of mind came from it. Donald Trump might have bigger business than real estate now, but he’s still a rich man whose fame and fortune developed in the 80s. He’s also a swindler. Classical political economy holds that trade serves mutual benefits through comparative advantage: when a winemaker and a blacksmith trade their goods, both are better off than they would be otherwise. For Trump, every exchange is a “deal” for someone to win. You can rip off or be ripped off.
This arena analysis isn’t so much an analogy as a description. Libertarians have demanded we cede more and more power to competitive markets. They now recoil with shock as several competitors in this arena rush down the referee. The headline right now on the website of the billionaire-backed libertarian magazine Reason is “Can Anyone Stop Trump’s Tariffs?” I’ll give them this: the direct market interventions and economic policies of the Trump administration are undoubtedly a violation of libertarian political prescriptions. But they are both an inevitable result of, and arguably ideologically in line with, libertarian philosophy.
Herbert Spencer believed unfettered competition would produce the “perfect man.” The perfect man would never shackle any of his impulses– imposing his will over himself would be tyrannical. The perfect man would have little mercy– protecting the unfit would hold back evolution. The perfect man would use his faculties to gain as much wealth and power as he could. The perfect man does not plan, does not believe, does not dream, he adapts.
Theoretically the perfect man was also supposed to follow the law, and engage in fair and honest dealings. But what kind of person would be both perfectly selfish and merciless and scrupulously honest and rule-following? And if such a merciless but scrupulous person existed, how could they possibly triumph over their dishonest counterpart? They won’t win by force. And they can’t appeal to democracy– Spencer barred that. The libertarian philosopher believed, above all, in adaptation. But liars, cheats, and warmongers have adapted. Evolution gives us viruses and parasites as well as whales, and Spencer argued against the immune response— democratic state action.
Herbert Spencer insisted that a cooperative humanity would arise from competition– that evolution would weed out the warmonger along with all those he believed unfit. He opposed socialism because he felt it was a doomed shortcut. Adaptation, not intention, was the road to utopia. But competition begets more competition. Donald Trump has adapted, brilliantly! He failed at business so he became a TV personality. He became good at exactly one thing– a sort of deranged charisma– and parlayed it all the way to the presidency. Twice.
Our present political moment is the triumph of Spencer’s beliefs– adaptation– over his policy preferences– free trade. A philosophy that demands adaptation and abolishes shoulds everywhere it can has no grounds to complain. Libertarians and neoliberals within the GOP wanted the anti-democratic enforcement of competition over cooperation. This is what it looks like.
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Donald Trump has successfully adapted to particular political and economic conditions– especially those Spencer’s neoliberal acolytes made reality in the late 20th century. Federalist Society judges bent the judiciary to right-wing whim. Neoliberals built a world where assets– like Trump’s beloved real estate– rather than wages underpinned economic growth. Unregulated competition has destroyed journalism in this company, and institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate have, as they were long meant to, limited democracy. We have created an environment in which this particular kind of person–
There are Spencerians everywhere in the administration. Robert F. Kennedy Junior is a health Spencerian: this is another post altogether, but he believes you can’t use vaccines to solve a disease, that’s a collective solution, it isn’t fair, it’s cheating. You should be pursuing individual adaptation with ivermectin and supplements. Peter Thiel, JD Vance’s mentor, is a Spencerian: democracy must be kept at bay to protect economic freedom from the peasants. Their entire foreign policy vision is simultaneously everything Spencer hated– vicious militarism– and everything he advocated elsewhere– no higher rules, no shoulds, only strength.
There is hope: the ideology of “strength” is often at odds with actually having it. A pluralistic and compassionate democracy will crush an authoritarian state, all things being equal. I actually believe Spencer was right about one thing: cooperative societies and tendencies tend to win. In a better system, so do cooperative people. But we don’t do it by playing the libertarian game better. We improve by intention, not adaptation. Cooperation is something we can only achieve by rejecting the rules of the gladiatorial combat capitalists put us in. We regulate businesses, form labor unions, insist on democratic decision-making, and maybe someday, supersede capitalist competition altogether. When the architects of capitalism’s arena wail that its cheating gladiators have now cheated, escaped the ring, and taken control of the game, we must not join them in rebuilding the colosseum. We have to build something better.