Tariffs are Vaccines / Vaccines are Tariffs

Symbolic and Practical Enforcements for Regimism

Since March 11, 2020—or what I refer to simply as 3/11—we see the normalization and routinization of the concept of “public health emergency” for all sorts of things, from viruses to the scrap iron industry. Now it has been applied to border control, in connection with the drug trade. If this is a public health emergency, then what are the symbolic and even practical parallels with 3/11? And what do we learn from that?

A Border Issue Turned into a “Public Health” Problem

Let’s go back to Donald Trump’s Executive Order authorizing the use of tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China. As I mentioned in the previous article, on Trump’s strategy, I pointed out that in that same order Trump declared the problem to be a “public health emergency”. He did that by focusing on the influx of fentanyl and its impacts on Americans’ health. See this passage, at the very top of the EO:

“I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, find that the sustained influx of illicit opioids and other drugs has profound consequences on our Nation, endangering lives and putting a severe strain on our healthcare system, public services, and communities” [emphases added].

Further on, Trump calls the problem for which the tariffs are a response, a “public health crisis”. He states that the problem is a “public health crisis,” not just once, but four times in the document.

First, why is it that virtually no other commentators noticed this? It is surprising to say the least, if people had in fact been sensitized to the language, norms, and policies of 3/11 as they claim to have been. Critical awareness, on the part of those opposed to lockdowns and mandates, seems to have dissipated (if it was ever really present, and not a series of gratuitous and opportunistic oppositional gestures). For my part, Trump’s declaration of a public health emergency, on the border of all things, reminded me of another development from 2023, in Trinidad & Tobago. Just as the country had begun to exit its “Covid emergency” phase, it launched a new phase. The Trinidadian government—inspired by American examples—declared crime to be a “public health emergency,” and then applied that approach to—of all things—the independent scrap iron industry. You can read about it here.

Second, I am struck by those in Canada—such as one of the leaders of the Freedom Convoy, Tamara Lich—who assert that Canada’s response to Trump’s trade war threats is exactly like the so-called “mass formation psychosis” that took hold during Covid. To that assertion she said: “100%”. But even if that were valid and warranted, it would only mean that we now had two mass formations (as we did during Covid): one on either side of the border. By taking Trump’s side, as Maple MAGA does, they participate in another mass psychosis, the one that is agitated about “illegal immigrants” allegedly “pouring across the border”. It is a really counterintuitive response, since Trump’s “public health crisis” uses the same keywords and logic that were deployed against the Freedom Convoy. How could they miss that? This would then be another example of psychosis: reality denial. They pretend not to hear “public health emergency,” and wave it aside.

Third, while fentanyl affects the health of some, does it affect the health of most? Does it threaten to “spread” to people who do not take drugs? If not, then why use generalizing language that makes it sound like fentanyl is a problem impacting the health of Americans generally? The reason why the EO is constructed in that manner is deliberate: it is alarmist hyperbole, needed to construct an extreme and unjustifiable (non-)solution. Fentanyl impacts “the health of Americans” is as inflated as maintaining that Covid-19 threatens the health and maybe the very lives of everyone.

Symbolic Symmetry and Continuities in Logic

As any other cultural anthropologist, I am attuned to noticing the reproduction and geometric translation of distinct symbolic patterns. It is this grounding that enables us to observe that actual cultural change proceeds at a glacial pace, usually.

The first thing we should do when we hear or read “public health emergency,” is to understand in which sense that logic is continuous with prior declared public health emergencies. Then we look for parallels, and see where certain meanings and signs are reproduced, or reworked, and are then redeployed.

First, what is the vulnerable “body” in question? Most would immediately answer: the fentanyl user. That answer is somewhere between minimally correct (but irrelevant) and incorrect. The vulnerable body, the organism at risk, in Trump’s EO is the American nation itself. The EO does, after all, simultaneously invoke a “national emergency,” which pushes the habits and choices of individual consumers far into the distance.

Carrying the symbolic construction further, this vulnerable organism—the nation—has an immune system. The primary membrane that risks infection from an unwanted pathogen is the border. The symbolic equivalent of antibodies are the border control agents. Trump is demanding to see evidence of more antibodies along the cell membranes that are represented by the Mexican and Canadian borders.

Trump’s EO is meant to “stop the spread”. The spread here is not of a literal virus, but a figurative one: the virus of illegal immigration and fentanyl.

If the patterns holds thus far, then it should be able to admit more symbolic equivalents. That takes us to the next point.

Tariffs are Vaccines

As hard as it is to believe or to accept (because it truly is devoid of any logical sense), Trump thinks that tariffs are a solution to border problems, and that tariffs can limit illegal immigration and stop the influx of fentanyl. If that were true, it would have been true during his first term. In actuality, fentanyl use increased by 44% during his first term, that is despite tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and alleged increases in border enforcement.

“I’m gonna create borders. No drugs are coming in. We’re gonna build a wall. You know what I’m talking about. You have confidence in me. Believe me, I will solve the problem” [emphases added] – Donald Trump in 2016.

However, it does not matter here whether Trump is wrong or right, what the facts are, or who is telling the truth. All that matters right now for this analysis is the symbolic value of statements. Tariffs are a “solution” to border problems as much as vaccines were a “solution” to Covid-19.

The point is that tariffs are deployed in the same manner as vaccines—they are meant to “stop the spread” and “prevent infection”. Not by themselves obviously, but by stimulating the appropriate immune response: more antibodies (agents). One might argue that other measures would have also “stimulated” the “response” of sending more agents to a border—and that is true, but also irrelevant: Trump chose tariffs, and he deployed tariffs specifically within the framework of a public health emergency.

Before anyone intervenes and says that “tariffs are obviously not vaccines” especially because they “do not stop the spread” of anything (thus misreading the argument here and instead looking for literal and precise 1:1 correspondences), let me add that we now live in a world where our vaccines, specifically the Covid-19 mRNA gene therapies, are also not vaccines in the “traditional” sense. This is according to a ruling in June of 2024, by the US Court of Appeals for the 9^th Circuit (see pages 18-19). The Court agreed that the Covid-19 injections did not stop the spread of disease.

Vaccines are Tariffs

“So,” one might ask, “does the argument still work if you flip it around?” Yes, it does. In actual, practical use, Covid-19 “vaccines” in most of Europe and the Anglophone world were deployed in a manner that created borders—actual borders, not symbolic ones. The only way one could cross such borders was by showing a passport, a vaccine passport (a card or a QR code). Without proof of vaccination, individuals were blocked from working, shopping, and/or travelling.

Vaccines thus raised the height of any existing barriers, so that only some were equipped to get over them and pass through. Vaccines also imposed a monetary charge, just as tariffs do, effectively increasing the cost of doing business—and that is true whether one complied or not (because the shots cost money, and the bureaucracy regulating their deployment and enforcement also cost money).

Vaccines themselves did not create borders any more than tariffs create borders. Political power creates borders. But vaccines were certainly used to divide people, and they were politicized (by all sides), thus helping to enforce borders. Vaccines divided, stopped movement, and imposed a cost: both symbolically and practically, they exercised the exact same political and economic functions as tariffs.

Tariffs, Like Vaccines, Bolster Regimism

We now get back to the part that bewilders me the most: how it is that people who spoke and acted as if they were so incensed by vax passes, and the politicized divisions resulting from vaccination policy—people who denounced the coming of “checkpoint society” and who were on the lookout for any mention of “15 minute cities”—are some of the most vocal defenders of tariffs and borders. On the one hand, they were pro-freedom; but then in the next instance, they are anti-freedom. At the very least, it means they have an inconsistent view of how human beings should be treated, and for me that is a problem. I judge everything by a set of basic “tests,” one of which is whether a given philosophical precept, policy, or action is at least humane, and by that I mean that it respects the dignity and rights of persons to live their best lives.

Checkpoint society does not necessarily violate that principle, but it certainly complicates it. While I accept and defend sovereignty (at all levels—but not to all extremes), I will not defend sovereignty that comes at the expense of others, i.e., where you suck capital out of peripheral nations, but then refuse entry to the very same people that your corporations despoiled, exploited, and displaced and who, by migrating, are essentially following their capital to where it went. Here is Saskia Sassen to explain it (from the 2017 documentary, Brexitannia):

When focusing on 3/11, the concept that I developed to describe what happened was pandemicism, and I had a very simple definition for that: pandemicism is the intersection of catastrophism and authoritarianism. You can find the concept used throughout the Disaster X website and in publications in Zero Anthropology Magazine (now archived).

But in launching Disaster X, I also explained the following, and I have to reproduce it in full:

‛Disaster X is useful for referring to a two-fold phenomenon which, until recently, was studied by separate sets of specialists. Disaster X is governed by a regime, where the latter is best understood as a system of interlocked interests and partnerships. One side of the two-fold phenomenon is the famous Military-Industrial-Complex (MIC)—which has grown to include academia and regime media. The main players are governments and their security and intelligence agencies, and their partners, the weapons manufacturers and their lobbyists. Their most common tools of intervention are missiles/bombs and sanctions. The other side is the Health-Industrial-Complex (HIC)—which also includes academia and regime media. The main players are governments and their regulatory agencies, and their partners, pharmaceutical corporations and hospital chains. Their most common tools of intervention are pharmaceuticals and mandates. Sitting on top of both the MIC and HIC is a Security State....The Security State is composed of both the National Security State and the Health Security State—and in both, concepts of “emergency,” “safety,” and “preparedness” are fundamental. Regimentation is the process and outcome of the operations of both the MIC and HIC. Where sanctions have been used as collective punishments against citizens of foreign nations, mandates and financial penalties have been used against citizens at home’ [emphases added].

The central operating principle that unites both vaccines and tariffs is regimism. It is a concept that does not exist outside of Disaster X. Regimism is meant to focus on the essential qualities of all authoritarian/illiberal systems of governance, regardless of their professed ideology (their actual ideology is always the same: maximizing power). Regimism comprises regimentation, that is, a high degree of control and organization, that is able to marshal citizens to act against their own individual interests by acting in conformity with the state. Uniformity, conformity, and obedience are critical components of regimism. Regimism also involves authoritarian leadership, one that centralizes power and limits individual freedoms. The third component of regimism involves loyalty, where a compliant population is made to want to submit to the regime’s authority, so much so that they will defend the regime as if they are the regime—and really, they are. The tools of regimism can vary, and I do not want to define something by its tools because these can change with time; in our time, the common tools are censorship, surveillance, boundary-enforcement, legal and institutional manipulation, economic extraction, human rights violations and, sometimes, a cult of personality around the paramount leader.

To avoid going on too much at length here, let me just acknowledge that students of political science will spot obvious correspondences between “regimism” and prior concepts that inspired it. These include personalist authoritarianism (which frequently includes both military dictatorships and populist governments that feature a prominent leader who is meant to be a unifying, messianic figure), and, bureaucratic authoritarianism, as developed by the Argentinian political scientist, Guillermo O’Donnell, a concept that spotlights systems where technocracy and oligarchy come together in governing a society.

In the case of Donald Trump and MAGA, regimism combines key features of both personalist and bureaucratic authorianism. I was not kidding when I wrote that Trump is right now seeking to build the Trump State. This combination is personified by two billionaire oligarchs—Trump the politician, and Elon Musk the tech mogul. The ideological plan they are following is referred to by some as corporate neo-feudalism. In this plan for society, large corporations wield almost total power over all individuals in society. There is a widening wealth gap that is testimony to a more extreme form of class stratification. Consumer behaviour, and citizenship generally, are manipulated via data collection and digitization. Legal and regulatory capture, bypassing courts and legislatures, and privatizing oversight, are also key components.

To summarize: vaccines and tariffs are instruments of regimism. Those opposed to one, but in favour of the other, are stuck in a bind they they likely do not even realize. (Some might legitimately ask: are vaccines, for example, always necessarily instruments of regimism? While I am tempted to say “yes,” I will not argue the point here, at least not now.) Protection from infection and protection from invasion are nearly identical concepts, with parallel tools, and are symbolically symmetrical. The regimism we experience in the world today, is one that has married itself to ideas and symbols of “health” (it’s not unprecedented, if you know any of the history of 1930s Fascist Europe): we live in “sanitary” dictatorships, with their cordons sanitaires, their purity tests, and their ethnic cleansing. Those truly interested in maximizing human freedom, which is a goal that transcends partisan ideology, should awaken themselves to the modes and methods of regimism so as to not reinforce it on the one hand, even as they challenge it on the other.

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