The Origins of the Current American Constitutional Crisis
America is still a very young country, and still alive with virtue. America is the only country on earth where its citizens refer to the government as “my government”, and the state as “the Republic”.
Do I see America to be in decline?
No, I do not. I do not believe that the Trump era signals an age of decline for America. I do think that America is in the midst of a constitutional crisis, but one that it has a pretty good chance of climbing out of. The bullcase of America has good odds.
I think America is still a very young country, and still alive with virtue. So I would disagree with Curtis Yavin on this point: he believes America is not young anymore, and when you’re not young, broken things don’t mend by themselves as easily anymore. I just don’t think that’s factually true. I think America as a civilization is still incredibly young. There is still a lot of room to grow, and most importantly, the American Virtue, while diminished, is still there. America is the only country on earth where its citizens refer to the government as “my government”, and the state as “the Republic”.
I became convinced of this when I visited Austin, Texas, in Consensys last year, and then stayed for 4 days at a friend’s ranch. I was astonished by how Austin downtown still has the typical Texan farmhouse in the middle of the city, still undemolished. I was flabbergasted to learn about King Ranch, a ranch held in private hands with so much land that it’s bigger than the state of Delaware and all the European microstates. And I learned what they meant by their “Way of Life”. They still live like Victorian aristocrats, guns, property. They hunt. Huge families with strong military pride - 3,4 generations of military service, and children learning firearms by 6 or 7. These people are virtuous in the sense they are truly sovereign, capable of self defence, self-reliant, and tight-knit. They are no 編戶齊民. They are farming-soldier-citizens, with both Jeffersonian and French-revolution-enlightenment conceptions of life and politics.
Trump's rise to power is the symptom of a deep-seated constitutional crisis. But Trump is not the crisis. And this constitutional crisis, I believe, can be resolved. Even if not through Trump, the overton window has moved such that I believe it will continue to be solved in the current direction in subsequent administrations. America is likely going to come out fine after this crisis, where constitutional norms will still be broadly upheld. However, the solution to the constitutional crisis will inevitably involve the dismantling or the reconfiguration of the post WWII order where America bankrolls everyone. And like how South-Vietnam was abandoned by America, because the Senate would rather leave the Vietnamese to communism than to let Lyndon B Johnson assume extraordinary war powers, bypassing the Senate, to wage secret and private wars, many states will be thrown under the bus as America goes through a fever.
America’s constitutional crisis stems from the Chinese slave economy.
While fiat currency and America's exorbitant privilege are deeper, structural problems—and have undoubtedly amplified the dysfunction—their reckoning lies ahead. The more immediate crisis stems from China’s export engine, which is fueled by goods produced under slavelike conditions.
If you want a glimpse of these slavelike conditions, you don’t need to say the word uighur. The uighurs are not really what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the control systems in Huizhou, Guangdong. The kinds described in Factory Girls, and the film A Touch of Sin (天注定). Chinese historian and intellectual Qinhui 秦暉 has coined this as China’s low human rights advantage (a parody of “low cost advantage”). China’s also what he calls a Negative Welfare State, where unlike liberal welfare states, which redistribute wealth downwards, China redistribute wealth upwards under the guise of “development”.
And the argument should be familiar to everyone now. The slavelike working conditions of China have hollowed out America’s manufacturing base - and that’s causing American citizens, endowed (or cursed) with the American Virtue, to become very unhappy, or addicted on fentanyl.
This is like Rome after the sack of Carthage and the invasion of Greece in 2nd century BCE. Huge hoards of slaves flowed into Rome, destroying all work opportunity of the working classes. The farmer-soldier class, away for wars for many years, found themselves returning to farms that have become unproductive through years of negligence. The influx of slaves concentrated in the hands of the rich also destroyed local farm competitiveness, and the farmer-soldiers found themselves selling their farms for a song. The proletariat class exploded, and flooded into the cities, driving up rents and depressed the urban quality of life, while the patrician and senatorial classes got immensely rich.
In the case of the Roman story, the problems begotten by slavery were never dealt away but were instead subsumed by the solution of importing even more slaves - so many slaves that everyone got one. The annexation of Egypt by Caesar was that. Whatever that couldn’t fix, free bread and circus was deployed to solve the rest.
The relationship between America and China, termed chimerica, is also similar to the set up of the antebellum North and South relationship. Here, we take some analysis from Roger Fogel, nobel prize winner of economics in 1993. The key conclusion he had was that slavery was in fact more economically efficient than the free market of labour in the North - in agriculture, and even in manufacturing. However, there’s a synergy between the free North, and the slavery-practicing South. The North was more innovative, had a much more developed financial sector, and therefore, had a lot more liquid investible capital. The South, on the other hand, had fantastic agricultural labour power, thanks to slavery. Insert here the very reasonable assertion that states practicing slavery are naturally disincentivized to innovate - the classical argument as to why Rome did not see the industrial revolution, even though the had fantastic engineering, and had already captured steam power, and that the Greeks already had analogue computers like the Antikythera Mechanism. As such, mechanical and industrial innovations such as railways and steamboats were pioneered in the North, which then trickled into the South, enabling the South, while exploiting slavery, to keep up productive efficiency. The United States as a whole ran an export economy, where Southern cash crops, primarily cotten, tobacco, and sugar, were exported to Britain.
Ignoring the moral abhorrence of slavery, the relentless evangelical assault on the institution, and their impacts on the constitutional discourse of slavery, the fundamental issue with slavery was that the efficiency of slavery would eventually consume and destroy the system of free labour in the North. Exactly like how Chinese manufacutring destroyed American manufacturing. It is very telling that the defense against this fear from extreme pro-slavery sociologist George Fitzhugh was that “no one ought to be free”. The American civil war was fought to eliminate slavery, the root cause of this problem, but at the cost of eliminating state sovereignty, or “states rights”, or “state nullification”, and so on. Before the civil war, the United States are; after the civil war, the Untied States is.
During the Civil War, the Union enacted an embargo against the South, preventing it from selling cotton to Britain and France, starving it of revenue. The Union also enacted powers to seize Southern ships and goods, treating the South as an enemy power.
What lessons can be drawn here for the current trade war between the United States and China?
Just like antebellum America, the slavelike manufacturing base of China has hollowed out the American manufacturing base. But furthermore, the transfer of technology from America to China, be it through trickling-down or outright intellectual theivery, to an manifestly adversary power, has replicated the tension between the North and the South in China and the USA. The manufacturing debasement in the US has also severe military and national security implications. The second world war was won by the American Virtue found in the American soldier citizen mass, and in American industrial power, where the Americans transformed and refitted their industry for war production. Today, the former has been gutted, and the latter has been weakened. This economic problem has evolved into a constitutional problem because it has engendered the political demand for radical elements to correct this, hence Trump.
Another interesting comparison is this. It was thought during the time of the Founding Fathers that slavery would gradually and naturally go extinct by itself, due to some presumed law of economic advancement. This is not too different from the magical thinking that as China economically liberalises and builds up its middle class, it will somehow, inevitably peacefully transition into a liberal democracy. Well, slavery didn’t naturally die out in the South, and China didn’t naturally transition into a liberal democracy. Au contraire, China became more and more powerful, and now, like the South, posed a threat to the American Republic.
Tariffs against China are meant to destablize Chinese manufacturing, and to incentivize American reshoring. A lot of commentary has been focused on the schedule mismatch - in that America is raising trade barriers despite the American manufacturing base has not yet been put in place. There’s also a lot of commentary on why Americans will not accept Chinese work conditions. I think both of those complaints are correct, but not deadly. American manufacturing will see rebirth, and there’s a second-mover advantage here. Here cometh AI, and robotics. It can be expected that the reshoring of manufacturing in America will not yield the kind of slavelike conditions in China, but will incorporate mass AI and robotic pipelines. Given there’s no legacy manufacturing pipeline to upgrade, the new pipelines can be built to purpose - for AI and robotics. This, I think, like so many AI optimists play it, will indeed unleash a golden age of industry, new modes of industry. It is to bring slavery back into America, but this time, the slaves are artificial intelligence powered robots. We have already seen this in AI-powered industrial farming.
Obviously this then engenders the question whether this fusion of labour and capital will beget its own constitutional crisis. And obviously, it will - but I think we have some time before that becomes an issue.
Conventional economic wisdom would dictate the trade deficit with China is an inevitable byproduct of the dollar being the reserve currency - dictated by iron economic law. A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System argues that this need not be the case. Manufacturing could be reestablished in the United States, the trade deficit could be narrowed if not eliminated, and dollar supremacy maintained.
In particular, this paragraph stood out to me:
Another unilateral approach to strengthening foreign currencies is to mimic the approach taken by some of our trading partners and accumulate foreign exchange reserves. By taking dollars and selling them in the market for other nations’ currencies, government can create additional demand for other currencies and increase their value.
This to me, rings like the Sornette Plan for a Swiss Sovereign Fund.
When will a true constitutional crisis arise?
First, some wisdom and observations from Lee Kwan Yew: “The American constitution is one of the most difficult to operate with in the world”.
Towards the later years of his political career, the more seasoned Lee Kwan Yew has come to view constitutions to be like a car, in the sense they define a machine, a government, that is to be operated, driven, controlled, by the leader of the government. And in his words, each leader needs to adjust the seat, the air conditioning, and some of the machinery of the car, so it can fit the leader’s political needs and style of leadership, as well as the changing political circumstances. He also thinks that constitutions are like a pair of leather shoes - the longer one wears them, the softer it becomes and more fitting to the foot.
Well, the American constitution is extremely difficult to amend, but it is pliable through the study of constitutional law - which is a whooy area of where jurisprudence and politics intersect, where propaganda and political doctrines may have a shot of becoming constitutional dogma if they got the right line of oracles in the supreme court.
A true and deathknelling constitutional crisis in America will happen when the societal structure where the loci of political energy do not fit the constitutional structure where authority is allocated.
Let us apply this framework to the Roman Republic-cum-Empire.
In this sense, the true constitutional crisis of the Roman Republic was not in the multiple civil wars from Gracchus, Salus, all the way to Caesar. The establishment of the position of the emperor, or the princeps spelt the end of the Republic in neither name nor substance.
The Roman Emperor was, in effect, elected by the military. The emperor was a constitutional anomaly, a non-office that only became a thing because the genesis holder of the title, Augustus, concentrated power in himself by assuming multiple hitherto separate offices simultaneously.
The emperor’s true core power stemmed from two sources: the army and the people. The rise of the emperor was the result of Rome’s political left defeating the conservative faction.
In the early Republic, Roman citizens—like Athenian citizens—were armed, combative, and responsible for defending their city-state. But eventually, the Roman military became increasingly professionalized and reliant on mercenaries. Citizens no longer had significant fighting ability, while those who did—legionnaires—were often new immigrants or barbarians. These men joined the legions to gain Roman citizenship and qualify for retirement land grants and pensions. Thus, a rift emerged: according to constitutional logic, power should belong to those who bear arms, but these new soldiers had little cultural immersion in Roman values, while those most fluent in Latin—Rome's traditional elite—had degenerated into a class of corrupt literati who preferred intrigue and submission over warfare.
As a result, the two original sources of Roman authority—the people and the soldiers—which had once been unified, now split apart: the people could no longer fight, and those who could fight were no longer the people.
Eventually, substance triumphed over form. Power gravitated to the military force, even if it was unconstitutional, while the nominally constitutional power of the people—though procedurally correct—no longer reflected the actual substance of the constitution. Military votes became everything, plebian tribunes became nothing - to the point that eventually, the imperial throne itself was sold to the highest bidder. After Emperor Pertinax was murdered by the Praetorian Guard for attempting to reimpose discipline, the Guard held an auction for the purple. In one of the most obscene moments in Roman history, Didius Julianus won the bidding war by promising each soldier an enormous cash reward, and was proclaimed emperor not by the Senate, nor the people, but by the garrisoned auctioneers in their own camp. Comparisons with the Deep State and the CIA are very apt.
Nonetheless, the ultimate aspiration of soldiers was still to become Roman citizens. After launching a coup, a Roman military government—though unstable and quasi-democratic—still required that ordinary soldiers receive citizenship, pensions, and land upon retirement. Similarly, emperors who seized power would still seek to legitimize their rule as far as possible through Senate recognition and traditional Roman constitutional forms.
This model, in fact, resembles the structure of modern Europe and the United States. For example, during the founding period of the United States, Irish Catholics—once seen as outsiders and even enemies—became insiders over time, especially after electing John F. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic president. The election of Obama is another example.
As long as this mechanism continued to function—where outsiders could become insiders through shared values and institutional integration—Rome could continue to exist. But once the elite class refused to uphold Roman constitutional norms, and the lower classes no longer expected or desired state pensions, preferring to fend for themselves, the collapse of the empire became inevitable.
Now, as the American Republic evolves, many elements could dislodge American society from its constitutional norms. How could they be responded to? Returning to Lee Kwan Yew’s observation on the rigidity of the American constitution, and American society’s quasi-religious perspective of it - which is very Roman indeed - the reason why the American constitution has been upheld in America and continues to function, in spite of its rigidity and inflexibility, while its copycats, especially in the Philippines as Lee Kwan Yew pointed out, is because of America’s vast geographic space and resources. The frontieredness of America has absorbed all collateral damage and fallout from rresolveable constitutional crises, and has given the American polity a massive margin of error in its operations.
A true American constitutional crisis will be upon us when the potential of the land and space is exhausted and no longer absorb the externalities of constitutional impasse and contradictions.
What is the true potential of America then? Since we’ve been comparing Rome with America for so long, let me end with the following analogies:
Rome :: the 50 United States
Italy :: North and South America
The Mediterreanean :: the Pacific + the Atlantic
Egypt :: China
Greece :: Britain / Europe
Roman Vassals :: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the European Union
Carthage, Persia :: China , Russia
Britannia, Gaul, Germania, Dalmatia :: Mars?