Is Your Resistance to Tariffs Just Bourgeois Attachment to Prime Delivery?

Bread, Circuses & Supply Chains. Is your entire political identity just spicy neoliberalism with an OnlyFans account?

Picture it: Brussels, January 9th, 1848. Karl Marx, absolutely zooted on cheap cigars and dialectical materialism, stands before the Democratic Association to deliver his take on free trade: “Free trade breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.”

Our current timeline is a crossover episode between "The Apprentice" and "Das Kapital" that absolutely no one asked for. Trump, looking increasingly like a Cheeto that achieved sentience through sheer force of posting, just went full Roman Emperor on global trade. Imagine a bull in a china shop, except the china shop is literally China (and Canada and Mexico). He's slapped a 25% tariff on basically everything that crosses our borders. Why? Officially, it's about fentanyl and illegal immigration. Unofficially, it's about trying to resurrect American manufacturing from its outsourced grave.

The response from the laptop-class was to treat this as a calamity. The New York Times published opinion pieces that read like Adam Smith fanfiction. When it comes to tariffs, the discourse on the left seems to be indistinguishable from the discourse on the ski slopes in Davos. Tariffs: yuck. Free Trade: yum.

Let's talk about the most embarrassing ideological face-heel turn since Mussolini discovered nationalism: Leftists cheering for free trade are betraying a hundred years of leftist economic orthodoxy. And it’s not just Marx. Literally every significant leftist economist of the 20th century thought free trade inevitably led to obscene exploitation of the proletariat. Joan Robinson at Cambridge was basically like "free trade between unequal partners is just imperialism with extra steps." Raúl Prebisch and the entire Latin American structuralist school were serving "core-periphery" analysis. Even based Friedrich List – who every developing country from Meiji Japan to modern China has plagiarized – was out here explaining why free trade is just British imperial psyop wearing Adam Smith drag.

Every attempt at economic development in the developing world was a form of import substitution industrialization. Nehru's India, Nasser's Egypt, Park Chung-hee's Korea – literally everyone who successfully industrialized in the 20th century resorted to some form of protectionism. Even America's own industrial policy gigachad, Alexander Hamilton, was giving "infant industry protection" takes.

Proponents of neoliberal economics like to tout the Asian Tigers’ 90’s economic boom as proof that free trade leads to prosperity, but it was free trade in name only. South Korea literally threw CEOs in jail if they didn't follow the state's export targets. Taiwan's government was basically running a planned economy with window dressing. Singapore's "free market miracle" was actually just state central planning.

One simply cannot claim to care for the working class then have your entire industrial base relocated to countries with suicide nets outside their factories.

So, what happens when we go from reading Dependency Theory to simping for the WTO?

Well, we’ve been here before. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE, Rome was throwing its weight around the Mediterranean like America in her current unipolar moment. Their version of free trade would make even Milton Friedman blush: patrician landchads importing infinite grain from their girthmaxxed slave plantations (known as "latifundia") in North Africa and Egypt. It was giving East India Company, but with more orgies and lead poisoning.

The outcome was exactly what you'd expect when you let the ancient equivalent of BlackRock run your agricultural policy. Small Italian farmers got BTFO'd so hard it makes modern factory farming look like cottagecore. Imagine being a Roman peasant watching your entire ancestral way of life get absolutely wrecked because some guy named Crassus III could get cheaper grain from his guy named Ptolemy, who had like 10,000 slaves and zero moral qualms. These farmers ended up having to sell their land to the same people who were undercutting them, and ended up crowding into Rome, creating an unemployed urban underclass.

The Roman state's solution? They literally started giving away free grain to urban residents and staging increasingly elaborate entertainment spectacles. Yes, the infamous "bread and circuses" policy wasn't just a cute phrase – it was the