The Grift Society

Historians often look for representative moments that signal profound societal shifts—inflection points clarifying transitions between systems. Future scholars might have identified such a moment in three related financial spectacles reported in one day last month, for reasons that’ll be clear below: politically connected Newsmax quickly outpacing Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp. in market capitalization after its IPO despite dubious prospects; the New York Stock Exchange Texas exchange opening with Trump Media & Technology Group warrants as inaugural trades; and Trump pardoning a bunch of crypto crooks. But future scholars won’t need such half-forgotten examples, because history isn't moving with academic subtlety. Its shift is arriving with all the tact of a Trump building sign—gold and oversized, slapped onto a towering edifice of gratuitous corruption we're all forced to witness daily.

I mean, of course, the tariff chaos begun by President Trump earlier this month. Commentators who aren’t still twisting themselves in knots to make all this still a form of neoliberalism have been reaching for analogies for the present era to pre-modern patrimonialism or 19th-century protectionism. However, viewing this moment merely as rejection or regression misses how it intensifies and ultimately breaks with critical elements of neoliberalism itself. That so many defenders of the neoliberal faith—from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to libertarian think tanks, from corporate boardrooms to mainstream economic publications—not only supported Trump's election but assiduously ignored what was coming until markets worldwide crumbled doesn't mean neoliberalism was opposed to the politics we’re all living through, any more than one opposes gambling after losing big at the casino. 

Instead, these neoliberal institutions are reacting like parents horrified by offspring they no longer recognize—the speculative-cum-gambling mentality they nurtured, the financialization they championed, and the erosion of trust they enabled have mutated into something that retains their DNA

Neoliberalism and Trumpism

The harshness of each era of capitalism has taken different forms. Industrial and colonial capitalism turned human beings into commodities, reducing workers to appendages of machines and extracting value through physical exploitation. Managerial capitalism brought bureaucratic control and existential alienation. Consumer capitalism shifted the terrain to desire manipulation and identity construction through consumption. Neoliberalism then transformed citizens into self-optimizing entrepreneurs, transferring risk from institutions to individuals while promising that market discipline would ultimately reward merit. None of these “systems,” of course, fully went away; history works through processes and tendencies, not layers.

What unites them is a progressive marginalization of the political in favor of the economic. Since the very invention of the “economy” as a concept in the 18th century, economic thought has increasingly portrayed resource allocation as a technical rather than political question. From Walrasian general equilibrium theory to Hayek's price signals to the Washington Consensus, a long intellectual project has been the eventual removal of democratic deliberation from decisions about production and distribution. All this eventually tipped into the neoliberal project to undo all but the Hobbesian skeleton of the modern nation-state.

As historian Quinn Slobodian argues, early neoliberals like Hayek and Mises weren't primarily concerned with eliminating the state, but with insulating economic activity—particularly capital flows and property rights—from the volatility of mass democracy and nationalist impulses. They championed supranational rules and institutions precisely to “encase” capitalism, deliberately limiting the capacity of democratic publics or national governments to interfere with market mechanisms serving global capital.

While doing so, neoliberalism transformed our understanding of both society and the self. It further extended and intensified market logic everywhere, recasting citizens as entrepreneurs of human capital competing beyond our jobs in various markets for education, healthcare, and personal relationships. The financialization and then securitization of everyday life converted much of human existence into assets to be invested in, managed, and traded. As market deregulation became the reflexive policy answer for all societal ills, capital flowed increasingly toward speculative ventures rather than productive activities. Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), synthetic CDOs that bet on the performance of other CDOs, and increasingly esoteric derivatives, such as weather futures and catastrophe bonds, often bundled and sold to retail investors through exchange-traded funds, illustrate this shift toward abstraction and speculation. Neoliberalism's core belief that markets should govern all aspects of life required creating new financial instruments to capture and commodify previously non-market domains. The resulting financialization wasn’t merely coincidental to neoliberalism but its logical extension—when everything becomes tradable and value is determined solely by market price, the financial sector inevitably begins to take precedence over the real economy. Similarly, perception management—as in the “inflation expectations” central to the monetarism of this long era—began to outrun fundamentals and material production in a race to the bottom line. 

Of course, neoliberalism isn’t a monolith but took shape in multiple ways—as a historical set of structures following Bretton Woods, as a policy package (1990s-style Washington Consensus), as a form of subjectivity (selves as assets to be leveraged), and as an intellectual movement with ideas and institutions dating to the 1930s. Jessica Whyte, Robin James, Melinda Cooper, William Davies, Philip Mirowski, Quinn Slobodian, and others have all argued that what has been missed in conventional accounts is that today's right-wing populism didn't emerge in opposition to neoliberalism but largely from debates and splits within neoliberal thought itself, especially when it came to enabling the importing of racialisms into economic concepts. Figures within the Brexit movement, Trum’'s administration, and similar movements worldwide don’t reject global capitalist competition or the primacy of the economic—certainly not specific neoliberals’ racial projects—they reject a specific arrangement of global capitalism that peaked in the 1990s while maintaining continuity with core neoliberal principles, Slobodian argues. While I agree with this reading, this reasoning could lead some to think that Trumpian racial politics only continues neoliberalism—just with an orange face. 

Change can only ever arrive, of course, out of the historical conditions in which it was formed. But just because the grift economy developed out of neoliberalism doesn’t mean we’re still within the latter, any more than neoliberalism was unreal since it arrived out of conditions set in previous eras of capitalism. Unfortunately, those who've long fought for neoliberalism's end now face a pyrrhic victory. The system is indeed collapsing—it’s been left for dead before—but what’s being enacted in light of its desuetude isn’t the democratic alternative that justice calls for, but somehow an even more capricious form of capitalism where unpredictability and arbitrariness are standard mechanisms of wealth extraction. As with previous forms of capitalism, the wish for its end became a curse.

From neoliberalism to the grift society

Just as the Victorian era had its novels and the postwar period gave us television serials, our contemporary media landscape is saturated with scam narratives that function as parables for our time. The endless streaming documentaries and series about con artists—from fake heiresses to bogus blood testing companies, from crypto scammers to festival fraudsters—share striking commonalities with what should be their antithesis, the spate of hagiographic biopics of CEOs over the last decade or so. Con jobs, of course, have long been important in film depictions—just think of any time Tom Cruise dons a Mission: Impossible mask to enter some top-secret facility or the various bluffs of action-comedies like Kevin Hart’s CIA (2016). But where the viewer roots for Cruise and similar heroes—there’s hardly an action movie in the last several decades without similar scenes—in their aim at some higher goal, the grift narratives have lost all pretense of anything so noble—no one is saving the world. 

Today’s CEO narratives from The Social Network (2010) to Steve Jobs (2015) to The Founder (2016) to Blackberry (2023) all have pivotal scenes of fraud and deception stripped of any noble purpose beyond self-enrichment or shareholder value. Viewers watching the Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Holmes characters—the latter modeling herself on the former's practiced speech pattern and iconic black turtleneck—receive the message that the line between celebrated visionary and convicted fraudster is merely a matter of outrunning prosecution. The competition isn’t the bad guys against whom they’re racing against the clock, but laws against various forms of fraud. What matters isn't the product but the story you can convince others to believe, a core part of the grift economy’s logic.

To recognize and thus combat what we face, we need to acknowledge the fundamental shift happening all around us, even as some will write that “simply moving away from past orthodoxy does not signify [neoliberalism’s] end.” The differences—more than just shifts in emphasis—go well beyond pop movies: where neoliberalism cast citizens as entrepreneurs of their own human capital competing in rule-governed markets, today’s milieu transforms us all into either con artists or marks. Where monetarism redirected economic policy from leveraging the historical data of the Phillips curve toward speculating on the ghostly future of inflationary expectations, we now have prediction markets like PredictIt where you can gamble on those expectations while real economies collapse worldwide. Where neoliberals fetishize stable money and fight inflation as the supreme economic calamity (certainly far more than joblessness), we now see cryptocurrencies celebrated specifically for their potential to appreciate wildly—essentially betting on and hoping for the very currency inflation that monetarism thought the devil incarnate. Where neoliberalism, borrowing from Frank Knight’s distinction, gave us the society of risk (where outcomes can be reasonably estimated), the grift economy gives us uncertainty (where we don’t even have that). Where the champions of the efficient market hypothesis helped bring more than half of Americans into the markets via passive index funds, the supposedly progressive tools of behavioral finance—the “nudge” theorists—have been weaponized to extract value through gamification and addiction-forming design patterns, including the most popular retail investor app, Robinhood. Where neoliberalism gave us Citizens United and money as speech, the grift society is giving us, in an ominous sign of things to come, Musk’s direct payments to Wisconsin voters and $1 million drawings to further confuse the line between voting and betting. Where for neoliberalism, contract formalism was foundational, Trumpist grifterism gives us endless lawsuits and appeals, making good on the principle that justice delayed is justice denied. And finally, yes, where neoliberalism promised liberation and broad economic benefits through the free trade and the liberated movement of capital (that often ended up sunk, here and there, in the zones of the world’s tax havens), the tariff regime promises nothing of the kind—just patronage networks of exemptions, cash transfers, and toll booths. 

Given all this, it’s unsurprising (see this Neonliberalism discussion) that Trump’s appeal for his supporters wasn’t a return to impartial rules, but the hope of gaining preferential access within these networks, or, as often seems just as good for many, seeing perceived adversaries crushed by them. 

In the company of grifts

Milton Friedman's influential New York Times Magazine essay, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” published in 1970, later became the ur-text of neoliberal corporate practice, establishing that the only social responsibility was to extracting profits for shareholders, couched in an argument that this would end up benefiting other stakeholders like employees. Friedman argued this wasn’t a defense of rampant criminality seeking out profits at all costs, since “basic rules” were needed to make sure companies were “engaging in open and free competition without deception or fraud”—an exceedingly low standard that now seems quaint.

Friedman’s work became the guiding principle behind the shareholder value maximization movement that dominated from the 1980s forward. This philosophy shaped corporate governance strategies that produced the explosion in stock options meant to align management and stockholder interests through share price incentives. The consequences were disastrous: waves of mergers and acquisitions, mass layoffs, leveraged buyouts, and the prioritization of short-term gains over long-term stability. This corporate short-termism, alongside the depiction of a corporation less as a “person” than as a nexus of contracts, and the corporate financial engineering that ultimately rewarded the C-suite at the expense of Friedman’s beloved shareholders, helped throw open the doors to today’s casino-like economy.

As the markets were “democratized” in the age of the 401(k), parallel changes in corporate law have in recent years aimed to do for management what neoliberals had previously done for economic laws—“encasing” them away from accountability from the actual owners of the means of production, namely, Americans with their individual retirement accounts. In 2025, given the spate of shareholder lawsuits over fiduciary responsibility and proposals for social responsibility passing at annual meetings in recent years, the SEC and state of Delaware, where most American public companies are incorporated, have been engaged in rule-changing efforts, as the specialist journal Directors & Boards put it, aimed at “expanding protections for directors and officers, giving corporations more control over stockholder demands, and codifying clearer safe harbors for conflicted transactions”—essentially expanding their ability to avoid shareholder oversight over double-dealing and fraud. 

In Delaware, these changes were sparked in large part by shareholder lawsuits that had voided Elon Musk’s record-breaking $56 billion Tesla compensation package, which the company’s board had approved in 2018 and continues to fight in court to provide him today. The legal shift marks a telling inversion: rather than protecting shareholders (the nominal owners of capital) from management overreach, Delaware lawmakers work to protect executives from shareholder oversight, short-sightedly changing rules that affect thousands of companies to protect the interest of a few. This is the grift economy's signature move: abandoning even the pretense of rule-based governance in favor of enabling extraction by insiders. 

We’re thus witnessing a years-long pivot from protecting shareholders from stakeholders (when defined as employees, customers, or the community) to protecting stakeholders (now defined as corporate executives) from shareholders. The hucksterism of the CEO cult is winning out, as Marxists can only look on jealously at how well executives have sidelined the owners of the means of production. 

The cheat code for your hustle

Given the above, it’s no wonder we have ubiquitous financial advice books like one out this month, Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work, a title so massively in line with the argument here, one would think I’m bamboozling you. Surely the book is needed given how the grift society’s gaming/gambling mentality extends beyond formal markets, a point demonstrated by how often we use the language of hacking and the hustle of financial criminality, including for the most mundane tasks (e.g., biohacking to mean taking vitamins). Meanwhile, as sports gambling has become normalized, the line between investing and betting, between your Robinhood and MGM Grand apps, has virtually disappeared. A couple of decades ago, financial news editors might send you a note for using the language of casino (wagering, betting, making a score, etc.) for choosing one investment or another; those days are long gone. Even basic economic security—retirement, education, and healthcare—now functions through a series of high-stakes wagers, where individuals must become amateur speculators simply to maintain their position. 

Thus, it's fitting that influencer culture has become the defining feature of our media landscape—those Instagram and TikTok celebrities who transform themselves into human mosaics of hilariously dissimilar expertise: part fitness model, part financial analyst, part lifestyle/health guru. Posing shirtless beside rented supercars and private jets they've paid to access for an hour, they promote “passive income” schemes and “wealth-building secrets” that require no actual production of value. Their content doesn't teach followers how to create products or services that people need; rather, it instructs them on positioning themselves to siphon off micro-percentages from the river of speculative capital flowing through society. 

Just as financial derivatives abstracted value from underlying assets, today's influencer teaches followers to abstract wealth from the perception of expertise rather than its possession. Their promises of “10X returns” and “financial freedom” through dropshipping, crypto trading, or rental arbitrage are modern updates on the confidence game, complete with manufactured scarcity (“only 50 spots left in my masterclass!”) and false testimonials. The fitness model with the six-pack abs selling crypto trading strategies. The twenty-something explaining real estate wholesaling from a rented penthouse. The stunning part isn't that these schemes rarely deliver—it’s that both parties often recognize the performance for what it is, yet participate anyway. Followers understand they’re unlikely to become millionaires through these methods, but still pay for the parasocial relationship and the brief dopamine hit of possibility—you can’t win the lotto without buying a ticket—while influencers create increasingly elaborate fictions to maintain the illusion that they’ve achieved success through anything other than selling the dream of success to others. 

In this way, the grift economy requires a profound inversion of economic logic. In neoliberal theory, financial markets existed to allocate capital for productive purposes, however bad faith those claims often were. In the grift economy, productive activity exists primarily as a pretext for offering up new gambling opportunities. The grift, of course, is not merely metaphorical—our milieu is replete with frauds and scams operating with increasing impunity. 

In the 1980s, it was junk bonds; a decade later, overvalued Dot Coms; and then in the 2000s, the emblematic asset of dubious distinction was the credit derivatives that would crash the global economy. Those of the 2020s include AI, meme stocks, and crypto. Then there’s the growth of hubs, a new type of urbanization, occurring in border regions and zones across India, Nigeria, the Philippines, and parts of Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, sites for massive call center scam operations, complete with office buildings, housing nearby, and thousands of workers taking shifts to target victims globally. Impressive, if that’s the word, in their industrial scale and organizational structure, they have business school case study-ready hierarchical management, training programs, and scripts, and come complete with performance metrics, quality control, and even HR departments.

For many of those on the receiving end, the line between gritty, but legal, telemarketing or your health care company refusing payment for your medical bills and the work of these newer industries making off with your money has grown indiscernible. Trump's many pardons of convicted fraudsters signal are thus seen as trifling compared with the wider normalization of scamming as a legitimate business model. For example, you have Meta and Open AI’s rampant “illegalisms”—a throughline from early capitalism, that’s Foucault’s term for black markets of early capitalism in Birth of Biopolitics—stealing en masse that totem of neoliberalism, intellectual property, in building up their AI systems and then offering nothing but flimflam for how they did it. 

The administration's embrace of cryptocurrency is, of course, part of this story. Crypto has for years been a major asset within public markets—in 2025, we’re way beyond Bitcoin ETFs—easing access to speculative assets that possess no intrinsic value, cannot grow based on any fundamentals (they don’t exist), and are often as central a means for conveying wealth after so many scams today—including those from hubs of the scam empire mentioned above—as getaway cars were to the bank robberies of yesteryear. 

The nexus of fraud

At least since Plato, theorists have known well that frauds and cons can only function as parasitic on social relations—a horrible twist on the trust endemic to them—but can’t become a practice too widely done since you need some modicum of trust for them to get off the ground; once that collapses, the end is chaos and violence. Yet, everywhere we might turn today, there scams are, dominating the scene. In a reversal, fraud experts conclude that today it’s “fraudsters [who] excel at collaboration,” something that law enforcement and fraud protection professionals, for a host of legal and technical reasons, “have struggled to master.” Politically, we have a veritable con man in the White House—his criminal convictions and SEC settlements are well known; so too are the daily grifts he seems to need as much as others need air—the absurd mix that is Trump University, his foray into videophones, the Trump Foundation, his apartment, his tax returns, his travel site GoTrump.com, his nutritional supplement business, his vodka, his Tour de Trump bicycle race, and on and on. Meanwhile, all the content of political critique is in the language of the scam: we’re constantly told we’re marks for the schemes of various politicos and parties. Giving you examples is superfluous—simply check any social media stream about politics or op-ed page ready to hand, or indeed, just about anything in the feeds of Trump, Musk, et al. 

It's not even that trust is gone, but that the cons are often out in the open, and perpetrated by the wealthiest among us. When not brazenly lying about future earnings and products that never materialize—Silicon Valley's “fake it until you make it”—our growth companies are inventing new ways to break laws worldwide, from Tesla's numerous settlements and unpunished violations to Uber, Airbnb, and others making themselves ubiquitous globally while breaking the law just about wherever they set down operations. Of course, dubious legal scholarship is being produced to defend all this, with Michael Kang in the University of Chicago Business Law Review referring to this activity as “lawbreaking as lawmaking.” These “regulatory entrepreneurs” deliberately operate in defiance of existing regulations—not asking permission but acting with impunity until they become “too big to ban.” Encapsulating the grift economy, Kang writes, uncritically, “These companies thus placed a bet, in pushing ahead, on their ability to convince government regulators not to regulate them as traditional service providers in their related industry, or at least regulate them differently on more preferential terms.”

When not being so entrepreneurial in their choice of laws to follow, many of the most valuable companies by market cap profit prodigiously off of networks delivering you over to pervasive scams and rip-offs—that’s your Amazon store, your Facebook feeds, your Apple app store, your Google marketplace. Meanwhile, countless publications are in trouble as Google Gemini takes their content for the once "don't be evil" company's AI Overviews at the top of every results page, crowding them out by taking their own work.

Thus, if the grift economy is producing innovation anywhere, it’s in transforming everyone—willingly or not—into participants in various cons. Whether you're a retail investor hoping to ride a meme coin surge before the inevitable crash, a content creator gaming algorithmic recommendation systems merely to have your stuff read, a reader trying to find that content through labyrinths of sham websites and browser-crashing videos, or someone simply trying to navigate extractive consumer relationships more reminiscent of the pawn shops off Las Vegas Boulevard than Adam Smith, you’re being forced to adopt the mindset of either the con artist or the mark. This conscription into con-thinking takes neoliberalism's atomizing logic to its next stage—a world where basic trust becomes impossible and every interaction is presumed adversarial. From the emails filling our inboxes to the pop-ups online to the ads for the pills barely keeping us going through all this, the percentage of waking moments not diverting oneself from one scam or another greatly outpaces the genuine encounters where someone asks us how we’re doing or says hey, it’d be great to see you, let’s catch up. By then, you’re not even sure they meant it anyway.

The savvy and the scammed

Paranoia and conspiracy thinking abounds—how could it not? Yet, despite the documentaries on various scams filling our streaming queues and regulator warnings widely touted in the media, we’re no better at avoiding the sting. In recent years, it’s been frequently said we live in a post-shame society, but I have my doubts, if only because of the great shame attached to admitting one was made the mark, that one didn’t see it coming. A depressing thought experiment would be to consider all the different forms of immorality people would rather cop to than admit being the innocent victim of a confidence game. Before he died, my father was scammed for a few thousand, no small amount for him. After some initial discussion to figure out what was to be done, he grew belligerently quiet—I knew never to bring it up again, even as I entertained highly dubious fantasies about authorities getting his money back. His dignity in not having to discuss it was simply worth more.

We’ve inverted moral culpability—the victim becomes more blameworthy than the perpetrator, bringing to life the antihero viewing relationship we’ve nurtured over the last couple of decades. But then we fall for it anyway. U.S. Federal Trade Commission data shows that, despite all the public warnings, despite the many streaming programs, scammers are only becoming more successful. While the FTC’s count of the number of scams was relatively stable year to year—therefore the statistical didn’t pie grow bigger—the percentage of those that paid out rose 40% in just one year (2023 to 2024). What’s more, cynicism provides no protection: researchers have found that those who think all transactions must be win/lose or zero-sum are more likely to be scammed—in wrestling this is known as the “smark.” And it’s not just older adults like my dad getting pinched: the number of older Americans—those who surely had a head start—who have been scammed or defrauded in their lives is far less as a percentage than those in their 20s, the generation we presume would be the most savvy about this kind of thing. 

What we face thus isn’t simply a crisis of individual discernment but a structural transformation that demands a communal response—another lesson in not taking societal problems and individualizing the blame. 

The racket society

This unsettling landscape echoes the diagnosis offered decades ago by Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School. Exiled from Nazi Germany during the 1930s, he grappled with the rise of fascism by diagnosing what he called the “racket society.” For Horkeimer, power increasingly operates not through universal laws or the mediating principles of liberal capitalism—the impersonal market rewarding the best products or the abstract rule of law—but through dynamics akin to organized crime. With appeals or invocations of universality and society gone, protection becomes the archetype of domination, where patrons shield clients in exchange for loyalty and obedience, and inclusion hinges on fealty to the powerful clique. Horkheimer speculated whether the era of bourgeois legality and market mediation was merely a fragile “interlude,” destined to give way to the resurgence of more direct, personalized, and coercive forms of rule. 

Which brings us back to the tariff chaos begun earlier this month. Viewing them solely through the lens of traditional protectionism misses their deeper function as instruments of the grift society. Their sudden, broad application—hitting allies and adversaries alike with staggering rates—serves to further shatter the predictability neoliberals always said was essential to rule-based international trade, asserting arbitrary power over established norms. This mirrors the racket’s disregard for universal principles, reminding all players that access and favor, not abstract rules, now govern outcomes. Where neoliberal speculators thrive on predictability—indeed, it’s where profitability lies in neoliberalism—participants in the grift economy see gains to be made in the chaos—including, perhaps, insider trades made just before Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff announcements.

Everyone knew what was next after those announcements: “Trump Family’s Cash Registers Ring as Financial Meltdown Plays Out,” as a New York Times headline put it. Securing relief from the tariffs will depend less on demonstrable economic need or compliance with clear criteria, and more on political alignment, successful lobbying, or performative loyalty—a state-administered protection racket on a global scale. Companies and even nations are implicitly forced to pay tribute, whether through political support, favorable investments, or other concessions. Neoliberalism sought the removal of trade barriers in a wide application of mutual comparative advantage; Trumpism sees no rising tides, no mutual advantages—only win/lose relations of dominance. 

However, a striking irony of this grift-laden period is that we don’t need to undertake any long philosophical analysis, take reporting trips, or go deep undercover to figure this all out. The grift economy first universalizes the scammer/scammed relation, then brings it out in the open. Unlike the neoliberal era, which often relied on cloaking profound economic and political decisions in the legitimizing language of technocratic neutrality and unassailable economic laws, the grift regime dispenses with the pretense—at which point one wonders if one can even call it a grift, bringing it all full circle. This shift from obfuscation to brazenness is central: where neoliberalism required at least the performance of adherence to impersonal rules, the grift economy revels in the scam of it all.

The tariffs thus serve as more than just economic policy; they are a structural reinforcement of the grift society that predated it, further institutionalizing—after decades of corporate capture and monopolization—networks of scams where transactional loyalty and connection grant access to loopholes and exemptions, fundamentally prioritizing insider advantage over the now-discarded ideas of universal principles (liberalism) or market logic (neoliberalism).

The return of politics

One danger among many is that the Trump administration’s tariff chaos is misread and widely portrayed as the only way to repoliticize economics after neoliberalism. One imagines Wall St. and major media depictions as seeing the need to depoliticize the economy once again, to return it to where it “belongs”—where central banks and international institutions can keep it safe from the clutches of Trump and his allies. We must not let that happen, not just because it misreads this period’s events but also because it renders a false dichotomy between neoliberalism and Trumpian grift. 

Trumpism—so obvious through Musk's moves with DOGE—doesn't bother with technocratic abstraction but works through personalized caprice, all while constantly accusing others of running the cons. One way of reading this is that Trump and Musk are positioning themselves as the savvy ones exposing scams, while casting their critics and opponents as either scammers or dupes. In classic confidence schemes, it's a common tactic to preemptively accuse others of running scams and establish yourself as vigilant and trustworthy. When accused of wrongdoing, you dismiss it as retaliation. All the while both you and the mark might know a scam is afoot. Even still, the mark stays in—they want the easy money but just don't know the score: they are the true target.

While classical confidence games conclude with a decisive moment where the con artist disappears with the money, the grift society requires continual new scores. The con never reaches completion because that would mean exposure. Instead, it must constantly regenerate through new accusations, new enemies, and new threats. This explains why figures operating in this mode are incapable of declaring victory—even when achieving their stated goals, they immediately pivot to new grievances and accusations. 

Besides immiseration for all involved, it also amplifies, as with neoliberalism before it, what Slobodian and others have found in neoliberalism, namely the racial Schmittianism that I described here a couple of weeks ago. For example, the presently woefully understaffed (at least when it comes to collecting the massive and different tariffs on the agenda) U.S. Customs and Border Patrol will have the steroidal-like growth that so many on the right have made their aesthetic home. Eric Schliesser notes: 

Industries protected behind tariff walls cheer on customs/police raids…[T]he subsequent effect is terror and the collapse of due process against purported criminals, smugglers, refugees, and people who hold the wrong opinions and the unapproved gender. This is a far more likely outcome than the re-industrialization of America.

In all this, the tariff chaos won’t return economic decisions to the realm of democratic debate. Like neoliberalism before, which sought privatization as a political project, Trump’s move isn’t simply the conversion of state power into a personal asset, a gambit that has made the vast schemes of neoliberal privatization look modest. Rather, it’s a politics devoid of democratic levers. Conservatives who have long dreamed of having their Schmittianism and their fully privatized markets now see the only real offspring those two parents could ever have, Trumpism and, more broadly, the grift society.

Like any nepobaby, the grift economy has quickly discarded neoliberalism’s carefully constructed façade of meritocracy. The challenge ahead isn't to restore neoliberalism but to imagine how the levers of power, now reclaimed from market fundamentalism, might be deployed to democratize our commons. Neoliberalism helped shape and the grift economy learned to thrive on our isolation and cynicism, profiting from our suspicion of one another, from our retreat into geographically and social media-segregated enclaves, from the belief that every interaction is win/lose, and from detesting political opponents as the silly dupes they are. 

In sum, we were living under a tariff regime long before this month. Overcoming all this requires not just policy changes but the capacity to see one another as fellow citizens rather than marks, as something other than competitors. There’s no cheat code for this. An admirable project of many here is to sketch out what that means economically, with some calling for a “commerce appropriate for today…a sphere in which we strive to provide honorably and use wisely,” “equal access to economic participation within a larger liberal system, or a “social democracy in confronting capitalism while still remaining true to liberalism.” Whatever is ahead, the transition beyond both neoliberalism and its grifter offspring will emerge, if at all, through millions of small acts of reconstruction—reconstructing trust through our interactions, reconstructing value beyond what can be monetized, reconstructing forms of democratic deliberation, reconstructing our attention away from the algorithmic slot machines that have captured it. In this way, the grift economy, despite the most profound dangers ahead, might offer the conditions for linking democracy and economic life, not by returning to an idealized past, but by acting upon the unmerited nature of economic arrangements readily apparent now for all to see. 

Featured image is ""Everybody Does It"–The National Excuse," Albert Levering 1910. Cropped.