"Do Not Buy US Products Under This Government," Substack, Mar. 10, 2025.
In 1999, now-disgraced public television host Charlie Rose was interviewing German foreign minister Joschka Fischer of the eco-socialist Green Party, who had joined the coalition led by Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party governing Germany from 1998 to 2005. Having grown up in the aftermath of World War II in a time when US soldiers were a part of everyday life in Germany, becoming a leftist radical during the Vietnam War, Fischer reflected on the current crisis in Europe, in which NATO, led by the US military, was bombing Serbia in an effort to prevent the expulsion of Kosovar Albanians from Kosovo.
With a dry but charismatic statesmanship, Fischer expressed affection for the US. He didn’t fear the US’s superpower status. He felt that the average US citizen’s limited interest in the world was essentially a good thing. They were looking more on the “inside,” he said. He didn’t fear the US becoming a colonial empire occupying other countries because their ignorance of other places meant that Americans mainly cared about buying shit for themselves, getting fat, and fucking. At least that’s how I read into it. But a few years later, after the US’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the Bush administration’s horrible failures, imperiled by their fundamental lack of anthropological understanding of cultural differences, Fischer’s tone changed. He regretted how “inside looking” the country was, and wished that “public opinion would look more to the outside.”
I have been remembering this conversation lately because of the so-called “America First” ideology of the current administration and its total contempt for alliances beyond the US. I spent the last two decades attempting to better grasp the changing patterns of urbanism and development that predominated in New York City between the late 1950s and our time. The closer you looked, the more you saw a familiar pattern. The ideology of the market fundamentalism—the idea that the free market was going to miraculously solve every human problem and meet every need without government regulation, investment, or oversight—little by little comes to completely overtake common sense in every realm of policy. This pervasive blind faith in the market—more than racism, more than Christian fundamentalism, more than the US’s imperial history, more than the decline in public education, more than systematic failures of media leading to a distorted understanding of the world—is what accounts for the current collapse of the US. The US is no longer functional because its citizens no longer believe in anything but the ideology of market fundamentalism.
Market fundamentalism is an ideology of capitalism that grew out of economists’ reaction against the rise of Nazism in Germany and Communism in the Soviet Union. It takes government itself to be the common enemy of the free market, and naively ignores all of the necessary conditions provided by governments that enable actually functional markets to perform in ways that are not destructive to the greater public interest.
It would be worth looking in close detail at the comments of the most vociferous defenders and champions of the unholy alliance of Trump and Musk. You tend to see a repeated pattern of blind faith in their “genius” and reference to their wealth itself as evidence of their righteousness. Belief in their profiteering off of the government is seen as a virtue in itself, not a reason for criticism. Right-wing toadies think billionaires are right because they are rich, ipso facto. This is the cult of market extremism. This is the reason why boycotts, strikes, divestment in US companies, reducing consumption, and anything that brings about market failure is the best way to fight the Nazi Republican fascists. Do not buy US products under this government.
