Is Peter Navarro a Moron?
A note: Trump, as is his propensity, already caved on this issue, but here it is anyway.
“By what standard then shall we rightly judge these things? By wealth? An evil test to use.” - Euripides, Electra
You spend 3 months scrambling across the deserts, mountains, and selvas of Peru, get off the plane, and the world’s a flux. Nowhere more so than the newly resurgent and triumphant Trump administration. Most amusing, Trump’s extra-constitutional and once world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is calling Trump’s trade policy guy “a moron.”
In an extraordinary broadside on Tuesday morning, Musk, a long-standing critic of tariffs, called trade tsar Peter Navarro a “moron”, and “dumber than a sack of bricks”, after the economist dismissed the Tesla boss in a TV interview as a “car assembler” and accused him of “protecting his own interests.”
Trump’s WWE/Reality-TV presidency is dervishly spinning faster. The best one can hope is for at least a bit of entertainment. Regardless, you can ask is Peter Navarro a moron. I can tell you he definitively is not. Will he come out atop this cage match with Elon? If the past is a guide, certainly not. Trump always caves.
Way back, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Navarro was a political ally of mine on several issues. This was in San Diego in the late 80s and early 90s. We had moved to San Diego from Chicago in the fall of 1987. I had wanted to get out of campaigning, but one needs mammon, sustenance, so I quickly did several campaigns which got me noticed amongst the local political class. However, I still wanted out. So, in the fall of 1990, I made one of the worst political decisions of my life agreeing to start up the San Diego chapter of the public interest group, Citizen Action.
Citizen Action was a not affiliated, Nader-type public interest group. These groups appeared for a few decades, an attempt to fill the political void caused by the collapsing local parties. The politics of money, polls, and television was ascendent. Citizen Action was funded by a door-to-canvass, at a time when no one was going door-to-door. This was meant to provide a needed independence. However, at the second national meeting I attended in Cleveland, Ira Arlook, who headed the organization (I do believe he is still around in DC), announced each local chapter had to start raising money from big donors. Well, that’s that I thought. I already watched and wanted no part of big money’s takeover of the election process. A few years later, Citizen Action was caught up in some sort of political money laundering scheme. A few local chapters may still exist.
One issue I focused on in my brief eight month tenure was a proposed highway a city councilwoman wanted to run through Mission Gorge Park, a beautiful space they had managed to keep undeveloped in the middle of San Diego. This road was a simple boondoggle and would eat up a big chunk of a road bond voters had just passed for the maintenance of streets across the city. It was universally deplored by environmentalists in San Diego, yes, there were a few, certainly more than in Chicago, but then that’s sort of damning with faint praise.
At that point, many environmentalists in California were trying to stop the tsunami of housing development breaking upon the state. They were most notably successful in places like Marin, Santa Barbara, and other bit parts like northern San Diego County, where Peter Navarro was prominent voice of the movement. Many people begrudged and condemned this movement of people who moved to some very beautiful places and then fought to keep it. I never did. Conservation of open space has always been the most radical of environmental causes and I say by whatever means necessary.
So, I met and worked with Peter as part of a rolling coalition that over three years fought to stop the highway across Mission Gorge Park. I headed the campaign for a few months. One highlight, I went to a Saturday morning cleanup of Mission Gorge and there, beyond belief, was highway promoter, Councilwoman Judy McCarty, giving a speech to the fifty or so gathered about the beauty of the park and the open space. Well, that was all I could stands and I could stands no more.
I shouted out, “Why don’t you tell them about the highway you want to build across it,” as I pointed across the canyon. Hah, suddenly the plastic smile was gone, her eyes squinted, and she growled, “I know who you are.”
“Great,” I replied, “But why don’t you tell them.”
Well, she quickly finished and left. I was still relatively new to San Diego, but this event held me in good stead with the environmentalists. Later, Councilwoman Judy came up with one of the best lines ever hurled at me. She labeled the opposition to her highway, “elite backpacker types” – hah. A few apolitical friends, who I crawled around the Anza-Borrego desert with for several years, never tired hurling against me in defense of any stupid argument that I was just an elite backpacker type.
The last thing I did at Citizen Action was organize a press conference and opposition to a council vote on the issue. Navarro attended and spoke at both. We lost the vote, but not the war. A year later, with the deciding vote cast by the guy who’s campaign I ran for city council a year before, the highway was defeated. When I go back to San Diego, I like going to Mission Gorge. It’s a beautiful place and stopping that highway was one of the concrete things I helped manage in politics.
This was all in the summer of ‘91. One evening, sitting in the Citizen Action office I had just opened a few months previously on El Cajon Blvd, in walks Peter Navarro. Now, Peter’s day to day attire around San Diego was a t-shirt, those short nylon jogging shorts that had become popular in the 70s, and running shoes. Peter lived in the north county and commuted to his job as an economics professor at UC Irvine in Orange County. I liked him well enough, but what followed was such a peculiar conversation I still well remember to this day. He began a circular discussion of telling me I was new to San Diego and had made a big splash, but I needed to be part of what was established, blah, blah, blah. It was odd and I couldn’t figure out what he was about.
A couple months later, he announced he was running for Mayor and it all made sense. However, a month before, I left San Diego for Los Angeles to do the Brown campaign, a clarion call against the decline of democracy in America. Once in awhile, I think what if I had stayed in San Diego and run Navarro’s campaign? He was a complete outsider, a legitimate environmentalist, who for a numbers years had already fought an established and undeniably powerful political force in Southern California, real estate developers. He only lost the race by a few votes. One thing for sure, Peter wouldn’t be where he is now if he won that election. What better example of the contingency of history.
So, is Peter Navarro a moron? Not in my experience. Is he a fool? You can all be your own judge. But this brings us back to his foil, the formerly richest man in the world. Is Elon a moron, absolutely. Oh, the Muskiveks, the bores, or is it Boers, will cry, “He’s so rich, he has to be a genius.” Ok, let’s just say Elon’s a fool and he proves it every other time he opens his mouth. Navarro’s swipe that he’s just a “car assembler” is spot on and even more importantly that Elon’s just protecting his own interests. Just like our entire American oligarchy, all Elon acts on is his own interests, though not truly understanding what they are.
One thing certain, Elon’s not an environmentalist. He’s a huckster of Trumpian proportions. Elon is completely of the Trump Era. What else can you call someone who takes a 150 year old technology like electric cars and sells it as new, championed by far too many American environmentalists. But you have to understand, American environmentalism, despite the absolute sincerity of many, is overwhelming about saving the American hyper-consumptive lifestyle. Elon lets them believe they can save what is one of the most energy wasteful practices of modernity, transporting 170 pound people encased in 4000 pound vehicles. Electrifying American car culture is no answer to anything.
Most amusing, in the FT article, Elon, in an example of kindergarten politics, has his brother defending him. “Kimbal, who is on the boards of Tesla and SpaceX, called Trump’s tariffs a ‘structural, permanent tax on the American consumer’, in a post on X. ‘A tax on consumption also means less consumption. Which means less jobs,’ Kimbal added.”
Phew! There’s so much wrong with this, but simply, if you care about any environmental problem, the key solution to all is less consumption, and that’s ok, really! In fact, it can be better, but it means doing things differently. For example, not thinking someone is a genius because they create a new car company in the 21st century, the absolute last thing the planet needed.
Trump’s tariffs have rocked the world. It made me think of Dave Chappelle’s astute and accurate observation a couple months ago, “Trump’s a wild guy.” However, as someone who has been against the deindustrialization of America as long as Donald Trump, blanket tariffs isn’t the strategy to take, but then to ascribe strategy to Trump is a stretch, he’s more a Tik Tok tactician.
The deindustrialization issue was determinative in getting him elected, twice. At the end of WWII, America stood as the only remaining industrial power on the planet. Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan’s industry’s were largely obliterated. It took a good decade for Europe and Japan to get moving again and as good imperial capitol, the US began taking in its colonies’ manufactures. Japan started bringing in cheap electronics and then in the 70s, with the two oil shocks, small cars. Quite astonishingly, Detroit seemed completely incapable of producing. But it was cultural as much as economic incapacity, nothing defined the post-war American Dream more than owing a big, gasoline wasting, two-ton automobile.
American manufacturing had begun its long decline, rapidly accelerating in the Carter/Reagan recessions of the late 70s and early 80s. American multinationals began offshoring their production, arbitraging the cost of global labor. It was amusing, if you had the stomach, watching elected officials telling American workers making $15 an hour they needed to compete against workers in other countries making a dollar. There were a few people, and Donald Trump was one, saying this was stupid. Richard Gephardt, who ran for president in 88, was another, and then Ross Perot in 92.
But it was Mr. Bill, winning in 92, who completely changed the balance. The Clintons came into office actively supporting deindustrialization. The trade-off for good manufacturing jobs would be mountains of imported cheap consumer goods. The economic and cultural devastation this caused was ignored by the political class until 2016, whence came Donald Trump telling all those people they had been fucked by their own government. “What a world, what a world,” Hillary was heard to exclaim on election night as she watched her life’s ambitions melted by a bucketful of deplorable votes.
One thing for certain, the corporate globalization process that emerged over the last fifty years is not going to be dismantled in four years. Nor, as Trump sells supporters, will there be some sort of magic resurrection of a mythical 1950s American economy. What is very clear from a few days, these tariffs might very well monkey-wrench the corporate globalization system. (As I write this, Trump has already caved.)
In his second term, Trump brought with him the Republican establishment and more than a few corporate Democrats. Yet, this lot, as demonstrated by Elon, is against any tariffs. In fact, many of them have made and invested tons of money on the deindustrialization of America. The tariffs quickly threw into question the value of a whole lot of debt this system is built on. Debt that one way or other needs to be destroyed if the world is to meet the challenges we face a quarter of the way through the 21st century. Debt that needs to be destroyed if there is any chance of reviving democracy in America.
So, as we watch our reality-tv politics twirling into oblivion, let’s hope it’s able to bring down a few with it, starting with the ever more ridiculous Elon Musk.