I’m going to keep this short and the opposite of sweet. Let us think it through, as reasonably and clearly as we can: how bad are the Trump years really going to be?

The first thing that America has lost is prosperity. How do I know? The fundamental equation of macroeconomics says so, without a shred of doubt. Y = C+G+I+NX. Don’t be scared. It’s much simpler than it looks. It just means: GDP = Consumption + Government expenditure + Investment + eXports.

Now. What are the effects of Trumponomics going to be? Simple. He’s going to slash government expenditure. He’s going to tear up trade agreements, leading to fewer exports. He’s going to deregulate across the board, thus disincentivizing investment (monopolies don’t invest: competitive industries do). And he’s going to eviscerate public goods like healthcare — and because people will pay more for them, they will be able to spend less on other things, they will be forced to consume less.

All the terms of that equation are going to fall.

Therefore, GDP must also fall. Whether we call it a “recession” or a “depression” is a technicality: what is true is that the US now faces an economic catastrophe on the scale of a historic natural disaster or a war. Those are the only phenomena that can depress all the factors of the macroeconomy at once. Reread that last sentence, because I can’t overstate it.

We all lose — permanently, forever. Trumponomics puts us on a lower growth trajectory, forever, just as if your yearly income suddenly went down. That portends an America in which life is bleaker and harder and nastier than it was just yesterday.

But that is just the beginning.

The second thing America has lost is power. Let us consider both kinds, soft and hard. Hard power’s easy: a poorer America, one with broken institutions, one that is divided and riven internally by a Trump, can hardly exert power against anyone else. You might be scared of Trump if you’re an American citizen — but if you’re the head of a rival state, you’re laughing, right?

Soft power, by contrast, is simply a society’s ability to influence, inspire, lead. Think of it as the power not to force other nations to obey — but to earn their trust, admiration, respect. To be noble and wise and great enough that they wish to be like you. When they wish to be like you, then you earn allies and partners effortlessly.

But who wishes to be like America now? Just a few years ago, the world’s middle income countries — let’s say the Koreas and the Thailands — might have looked to the US as an example to follow. But now? If they copy the US, the future is demagoguery, stagnation, and the devastation Trumponomics has yet to wreak. What sane country would want American decline for itself? Especially before it has even risen?

Without power, the US will struggle in subtler ways. It will lose the talented immigrants and students that have flocked to it. It will lose bargaining power in the partnerships and alliances that it has been able to dictate. It will be viewed with suspicion, and other nations will not share their great ideas, resources, and efforts with America. They will not invest in America, and so capital will flow out, leaving Americans poorer and more unstable than before. That is what it truly means to be powerless today.

And that brings me to third and last thing the US has lost: moral purpose. No, moral purpose isn’t being a saint. It is simply the ability to create a genuinely better future. Those who can have true moral might, don’t they? America had vast moral purpose once: it was able to convince the world to follow its lead, to adopt first constitutionalism, then liberal democracy, then capitalism. That was Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis.

But now?

America has been losing moral purpose for decades, in dribs and drabs. A needless war here, a secret jail there. And yet, there was still a payoff. Perhaps if you followed the American way you might have your own Apples and Obamas and Spielbergs one day. But now things are very different. Trump does not offer the world a better way — but a much, much worse one. Should the world follow the new American model — which I’ve summed up above as a demagogue who causes a needless depression, weakening a society to impotence — there is no light at the end of the tunnel. There is only darkness.

Think of it in your own life. If you have no moral purpose in the eyes of your family, your employees, your community, if you cannot offer them anything they think is genuinely worthy, virtuous, noble, wise, true, what do you really lose? You lose you. The sense that you matter.

So without moral purpose, a nation loses the most valuable thing of all. Trust, faith, self-worth. It comes to see itself as a fallen, broken place. It loses its heart, its spirit, its soul. And it loses its way. It comes to feel empty and hollow inside.

That is the greatest thing America has lost. Not just money, or power. But its spirit, its soul, its heart, which is what the world always admired, even its enemies and adversaries. It has lost today a sense that it matters, that it endures, that it resonates, that it means something.

And yet. That might just reveal something to keep in mind. The challenge of these dark years, the Trump years, isn’t merely staving off the plutocrats, saving the economy, or seizing back the reins of global power. That’s what we’ve boiled American life down to for too long, right? Money and power, fame and fortune, megayachts and cocaine flings, “having it all”, “leaning in”, all that tedious, soulless bullshit? So perhaps the Trump years are here to remind us: none of those are what America was genuinely about.

The challenge of the Trump years is deeper, harder, truer than money and power. SOS. It is reclaiming our souls.

Umair

January 2017