Why is it Important to Study Spain?

 

Right now, in the US, there is a lot of anti-Latin American sentiment being stoked by the neoFascist Trump II Administration. I live in the US Southwest have spent a lot of my life doing statistical analysis of Latin America (for example, here). My off-the-cuff explanation for the animosity toward the Southern Border is that Washington DC elites have little understanding or interest in what is happening in the US Southwest. The struggles of dark-skinned Latinos and Native Americans are just of no interest to the White power structure in the US.

Whatever the real reasons for nativist hostility, it would seem to me useful to study the history of the US Southwest starting with the Hapsburg Monarchy after the discovery of the New World by Spain. The map above (from Spain: the Center of the World 1519-1682) shows that the Hapsburg Empire initially controlled the US Southwest and the Spanish influence is evident everywhere in the present. Xenophobic politicians and their supports cannot simply get rid of Spanish culture by harassing Latin American immigrants. It is too deeply entrenched in the Southwest and too widely embraced by Americans living there.

In future posts, I will just reference this post rather than repeating my reasons for studying Spain in the US.

The Decline and Fall of Elon Musk and Steve Bannon

Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, two fellow travelers with the Trump II Administration, have gained a lot of notoriety for embracing pseudo-Nazi imagery and arguing (here) that the US will Decline and Fall for the same reasons that (supposedly) destroyed the Roman Empire: declining birth rates and declining morals. My analysis of the Decline of Rome (here) and that of a lot of historians, says they are wrong and deluded.

Tweaking the George Santana quote a little: Those who deliberately mis-remember the past are determined to repeat it. Because History is not the unbiased record we might wish it to be, it will always be selectively used and misinterpreted for political purposes. On the other hand, it offers an opportunity to educate citizens on things they evidently did not learn in school.

 

Magnitude of Trump Shocks

 

It seems that the US (and maybe the World System here) are in for some shocks from the Trump II Administration. Just yesterday, Trump seems to have imposed strong tariffs on every country in the World-System (except Russia) and countries (such as China) have instituted retaliatory tariffs. It's hard to understand why Trump is doing this: tariffs are against economic orthodoxy and against Republican economic free-trade orthodoxy. Maybe he was asleep in ECON 101 or maybe there is no explanation.

Here's another idea: Trump learned to like the botched COVID-19 Pandemic Response at the end of the Trump I Administration (2017-2021) and decided to impose his own Shock Therapy on the US and the World System. For a needy narcissist, it does get everyone talking about him!

The graphic above shows a time plot of Quarterly US GDP residuals from (2005,1) to (2024,1) produced by the USL20 policy model. The largest shock to GDP during this period was the bungled Trump Administration response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Can we expect another shock like the COVID-19 Pandemic shock from the Trump II Administration? Time will tell...