In 1981, French voters elected Socialist Party leader François Mitterrand as president and followed that one month later by electing a parliament controlled by a coalition of Socialist and Communist Party members. It was France’s first genuinely left government since Léon Blum presided over another Socialist-Communist parliamentary majority in 1936, and it came complete with a platform that included the nationalization of many industries.

Capital was displeased. The value of the franc nose-dived on currency markets, and Mitterrand was compelled to officially devalue it. Foreign investment in the country dried up, and major domestic investment also slowed. Within a little more than a year, Mitterrand was compelled to relegate his platform to history’s dustbin. He’d been defeated by the markets.

Can’t happen here, right? The dollar—the world’s reserve currency since the end of World War II—ain’t nobody’s franc. America has been seen as the world’s safest repository of funds for even longer than that. None of the policies enacted under Democratic presidents beginning with Franklin Roosevelt (progressive taxes, worker rights, environmental protection, Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare) that the right has always claimed eroded American capitalism actually retarded the flow of global capital into American enterprises and the American dollar. After decades of deregulation, the financial panic of 2008 did freeze investments for a time, but even then, it was our Federal Reserve that had the resources and credibility to bail out not only domestic banks, but the national banks of other nations as well. And so, after a few years, the inflow of global capital continued to increase, and at no time, even in the immediate aftermath of 2008, were other nations’ currencies considered safer than ours. The markets looked at America and, at least compared to anyplace else, liked what they saw.

That, as you doubtless know, was then. Donald Trump returned to power this January with an agenda as ambitious as Mitterrand’s in 1981, though it bore no substantive resemblance to the French president’s. It centered on personal retribution; on decimating the largely anti-Trumpian “new class” employed by government, universities, NGOs, law firms, and the media; on returning American culture, industries, demographics, and demographic hierarchies to his image of the (largely immigrant-free) 1950s, if not the 1890s; on extending his dominion over the legislative and judicial branches of government despite the Constitution’s explicit prohibitions of such actions; on employing police-state tactics to achieve those domestic ends and selectively cozying up to other nations that are full-fledged police states; and on winning zero-sum games with as many other heads of government as possible by sundering alliances and imposing tariffs on their nations’ products.