Thanks for the comments - much appreciated. I can only answer fleetingly here ... do feel free to comment on my website https://chrissmaje.com/blog/ which I prioritise for discussion.
Ahem, yes, Alexander Hamilton - apologies for the brain fade.
Thanks Hannah for the Cahokia point. I mention Cahokia briefly in my new book, but don't draw that point out quite as much as I might have. There's more in it on indigenous thinking, though.
And thanks everyone for the other comments and links - food for thought which I hope to follow up.
Hi Chris, I’m a big fan having read both your books and looking forward to the next one! I don’t keep up on your newsletters as much as I’d like. However! I was reading a recent New York Review of Books piece on several indigenous history books, and a paragraph regarding Kathleen DuVal’s <i>Native Nations: A Millennium in North America</i> struck me as being TOTALLY up your street so I want to share a bit of it, and then what do you know, I saw your newsletter in my inbox today. Here’s what got me thinking about your work again:
“Take DuVal’s reflections on the rise and fall of Cahokia, the four-thousand-acre site near present-day St. Louis where Mississippian peoples constructed some 120 earthwork ‘mounds,’ or terraced elevated platforms, from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries. By the time Europeans first viewed the city, it had been abandoned for hundreds of years. The newcomers immediately began describing Cahokia as the lost city of a fallen empire, narrating a story of mythic decline and reversion to primitivism.
DuVal rebukes such depictions: ‘Ruins…tend to conjure images of collapse and a tragic loss of a golden age, but the generations that followed the cities’ fall generally described what came later as better.’ Far from evidence of tragedy, the abandoned city of Cahokia demonstrates that after experiencing the effects of centralization - the concentration and polarization of wealth, the impositions of social hierarchy as a means of maintaining order, the crowded conditions and sanitation challenges of urban life - Indigenous people rejected this system and decided to follow a different model. Archaeological records and oral histories alike indicate that although people remained spread across the Mississippi region, they left cities, allowed their fortified palisades to gradually fall into disrepair, and moved over far wider areas into small agricultural communities. DuVal emphasizes that this was a situation not of mass flight amid crisis but rather of slow and deliberate dispersal.”
Aris compares Anderson with the American historian of neoliberalism Quinn Slobodian who in Hayek’s Bastards, published next week, he aims to show that the populist Right-wing revolt against neoliberal globalisation is less than it seems. He argues that “important factions of the emerging Right were, in fact, mutant strains of neoliberalism” and that “many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it”.
This seems to align more with your perspective Chris which in a way I'd agree with from the point of view that Trump wants a neoliberal fair trade system rather than a neoliberal free trade system.
In other words a better balance between Wall Street and Main Street rather than a radical departure from both towards a hard form of economic populism.
Perhaps Wall Street reacted so badly because they are unsure whether he is neoliberal or a populist but what was certainly highlighted by his tariff war is that agrarian populism or any radical populist departure from the neoliberal status quo has the financial markets to contend with, especially with global debt liabilities three to four times larger than global GDP.
Of course the likelihood of this highly unstable system of debt liabilities ever being honoured as energy and materials become harder and harder to extract and process is for the birds which means how do we prepare for a post financial collapse world. The obvious answer is agrarian populism.
Couldn't agree more about the "omissions" present in the Right wing characterizations of Trump or the difficulties we probably should be having about seeing something genuinely "populist" in what he and the people around him are up to. Indeed, I just published something very similar in spirit to your essay ... here's the link in case you didn't see it.
Haha chris great minds think alike! As soon as i read N.S.' piece, I reached out to him to have him on Doomer Optimism to ask how things like energy or ecology fit into this strong gods -> weak gods -> strong gods argument. You may even like to join this conversation??
Playing the American pedant here, I think Chris has Alexander (not Thomas) Hamilton in mind when referring to the Whiskey Rebellion. But the heroic warrior strain in the US has some later avatars: Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, not to mention Charles Lindbergh. Gunfighter Nation (to use Richard Slotkin’s phrase) fantasies run deep in this country. But Trump’s sources are in the mock-villainy of World Wrestling Entertainment, once headed by—wait for it—his current Secretary of Education.
Thanks for the comments - much appreciated. I can only answer fleetingly here ... do feel free to comment on my website https://chrissmaje.com/blog/ which I prioritise for discussion.
Ahem, yes, Alexander Hamilton - apologies for the brain fade.
Thanks Hannah for the Cahokia point. I mention Cahokia briefly in my new book, but don't draw that point out quite as much as I might have. There's more in it on indigenous thinking, though.
And thanks everyone for the other comments and links - food for thought which I hope to follow up.
Hi Chris, I’m a big fan having read both your books and looking forward to the next one! I don’t keep up on your newsletters as much as I’d like. However! I was reading a recent New York Review of Books piece on several indigenous history books, and a paragraph regarding Kathleen DuVal’s <i>Native Nations: A Millennium in North America</i> struck me as being TOTALLY up your street so I want to share a bit of it, and then what do you know, I saw your newsletter in my inbox today. Here’s what got me thinking about your work again:
“Take DuVal’s reflections on the rise and fall of Cahokia, the four-thousand-acre site near present-day St. Louis where Mississippian peoples constructed some 120 earthwork ‘mounds,’ or terraced elevated platforms, from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries. By the time Europeans first viewed the city, it had been abandoned for hundreds of years. The newcomers immediately began describing Cahokia as the lost city of a fallen empire, narrating a story of mythic decline and reversion to primitivism.
DuVal rebukes such depictions: ‘Ruins…tend to conjure images of collapse and a tragic loss of a golden age, but the generations that followed the cities’ fall generally described what came later as better.’ Far from evidence of tragedy, the abandoned city of Cahokia demonstrates that after experiencing the effects of centralization - the concentration and polarization of wealth, the impositions of social hierarchy as a means of maintaining order, the crowded conditions and sanitation challenges of urban life - Indigenous people rejected this system and decided to follow a different model. Archaeological records and oral histories alike indicate that although people remained spread across the Mississippi region, they left cities, allowed their fortified palisades to gradually fall into disrepair, and moved over far wider areas into small agricultural communities. DuVal emphasizes that this was a situation not of mass flight amid crisis but rather of slow and deliberate dispersal.”
https://unherd.com/2025/04/leftists-should-relish-trumps-revolution/
Aris compares Anderson with the American historian of neoliberalism Quinn Slobodian who in Hayek’s Bastards, published next week, he aims to show that the populist Right-wing revolt against neoliberal globalisation is less than it seems. He argues that “important factions of the emerging Right were, in fact, mutant strains of neoliberalism” and that “many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it”.
This seems to align more with your perspective Chris which in a way I'd agree with from the point of view that Trump wants a neoliberal fair trade system rather than a neoliberal free trade system.
In other words a better balance between Wall Street and Main Street rather than a radical departure from both towards a hard form of economic populism.
Perhaps Wall Street reacted so badly because they are unsure whether he is neoliberal or a populist but what was certainly highlighted by his tariff war is that agrarian populism or any radical populist departure from the neoliberal status quo has the financial markets to contend with, especially with global debt liabilities three to four times larger than global GDP.
Of course the likelihood of this highly unstable system of debt liabilities ever being honoured as energy and materials become harder and harder to extract and process is for the birds which means how do we prepare for a post financial collapse world. The obvious answer is agrarian populism.
Couldn't agree more about the "omissions" present in the Right wing characterizations of Trump or the difficulties we probably should be having about seeing something genuinely "populist" in what he and the people around him are up to. Indeed, I just published something very similar in spirit to your essay ... here's the link in case you didn't see it.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-04-09/appalachia-country-music-and-american-politics/?mc_cid=1ebc6c86fc&mc_eid=aad67793eb
Brian
Haha chris great minds think alike! As soon as i read N.S.' piece, I reached out to him to have him on Doomer Optimism to ask how things like energy or ecology fit into this strong gods -> weak gods -> strong gods argument. You may even like to join this conversation??
Hey Ashley, that's interesting! Could be good, DM me if you like.
Playing the American pedant here, I think Chris has Alexander (not Thomas) Hamilton in mind when referring to the Whiskey Rebellion. But the heroic warrior strain in the US has some later avatars: Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, not to mention Charles Lindbergh. Gunfighter Nation (to use Richard Slotkin’s phrase) fantasies run deep in this country. But Trump’s sources are in the mock-villainy of World Wrestling Entertainment, once headed by—wait for it—his current Secretary of Education.