The so-called Washington consensus that touted the benefits of free trade and fiscal discipline looks headed for the dustbin of history.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s as President Donald Trump has launched a stunning trade war and pushed through a tax-and-spending bill with Republican support that will add trillions to the deficit. <\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Democrats are still grappling with their own message as they continue to reel from Trump\u2019s brand of populism that returned him to the White House. The turmoil points to a clash between competing visions for a new economic consensus.<\/p>\n
Mark Blyth, a political economist at Brown University, sees the economy heading for an epochal change, though a dominant economic order\u00a0has yet to fully take shape.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe global economy is getting a hardware refit and trying out a new operating system\u2014in effect, a full reboot, the likes of which we have not seen in nearly a century,\u201d he wrote in the Atlantic<\/a> last week. \u201cTo understand why this is happening and what it means, we need to abandon any illusion that the worldwide turn toward right-wing populism and economic nationalism is merely a temporary error, and that everything will eventually snap back to the relatively benign world of the late 1990s and early 2000s.\u201d<\/p>\n Such churn was on display this weekend as top tech leaders Elon Musk and Sam Altman signaled their dissatisfaction with the current two-party system.<\/p>\n On Saturday, Musk announced he is forming a new political party<\/a>, after feuding with Trump over the mega-bill that was just signed into law.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,\u201d Musk posted on X<\/a> on Saturday. \u201cToday, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n The CEO of Tesla<\/a> and SpaceX<\/a> had earlier warned of \u201cdebt slavery\u201d<\/a> from the tax-and-spending bill and criticized the its treatment of EV and solar energy tax credits<\/a> versus oil and gas incentives.<\/p>\n Similarly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X<\/a> on Friday that Democrats had lost their way and that he is now \u201cpolitically homeless.\u201d<\/p>\n He also appeared to refer to New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani<\/a>, who said last week \u201cI don\u2019t think that we should have billionaires.\u201d Altman said, \u201cI\u2019d rather hear from candidates about how they are going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have instead of how they are going to eliminate billionaires.\u201d<\/p>\n At the same time, he advanced his own vision.<\/p>\n \u201cI believe in techno-capitalism,\u201d Altman wrote. \u201cWe should encourage people to make tons of money and then also find ways to widely distribute wealth and share the compounding magic of capitalism. One doesn\u2019t work without the other; you cannot raise the floor and not also raise the ceiling for very long.\u201d<\/p>\n In Blyth\u2019s view, a new economic order is not yet discernible, because the governing idea is still being debated.\u00a0<\/p>\n He described the MAGA vision as a combination of 1950s manufacturing, 1940s immigration and workforce trends, plus a touch of 19th-century, mercantilist \u201cspheres of influence\u201d foreign policy.<\/p>\n