The Weekly Sift

One of the debates I keep hearing Democrats have is where to center the party’s message: Are we all-in on stopping the rush towards fascism? Or should we focus on kitchen-table issues like jobs and inflation?

This week I want to argue that this is a false choice, because autocracy is in fact the biggest threat our economy faces. The one place in our economy where Trump is exercising autocratic power is over tariffs, and that is precisely where our economic problems are coming from. The tariffs themselves are causing inflation, and the uncertainty caused by Trump’s arbitrary decisions about tariffs has caused businesses to stop hiring.

That’s not a coincidence. If you look around the world, the kind of strongman governments Trump admires — in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and elsewhere — are presiding over shrinking economies. So if you’re worried about your economic future, you should want to stop America’s slide into authoritarianism.

So the featured post this week is “An Authoritarian Economy is a Bad Economy”. It should be out shortly.

The weekly summary will discuss Gaza, Ukraine, RFK Jr.’s war on vaccines, the Texas redistricting standoff, and a few other things. It should be out before noon EDT.

By the way, I’m going to try an experiment this morning: I’m going to cross-post the featured post on Substack, just to see how it works. If you’re on Substack, check it out and comment.