Susan Kokinda, a co-founder of Promethean Action, argues that America’s political turmoil is not ordinary left-versus-right politics but a clash between two systems: a producer-based “American System” of industry, infrastructure and national sovereignty, and a finance-based imperial system she traces to the British Empire and the City of London. Here is her case, how it fits the history, and what her critics say.
In an interview with Michelle Makori of Miles Franklin Media, published on 31 October 2026, Kokinda, who is also coalition vice chair of the Michigan Republican Party, argued that the political battle Americans are watching is about far more than Republicans versus Democrats: it is a fight over America’s economic system and the global order itself. Kokinda has been involved in politics for more than five decades, many of them in the movement founded by the late Lyndon LaRouche, where she worked as a White House correspondent and Capitol Hill liaison. This is the first of five articles on the interview.
Two systems
The American System, as Kokinda describes it, rests on national sovereignty, industrial production, infrastructure, energy and technological progress. It is a producer’s economy, and she ties it to Western civilization and to the belief, shared by “all the monotheistic religions”, that human beings are made in the image of a creator.
The term has a real history. Alexander Hamilton laid out the program in his 1791 Report on Manufactures: tariffs to protect young industries, public works such as roads and canals (then called “internal improvements”), and a national bank to provide credit. Henry Clay named it the “American System” in the 1820s; Abraham Lincoln and the economist Henry Carey carried it on. Kokinda’s version keeps all three tools, “national banking, tariffs, internal improvements”, and draws a sharp line between a national bank and a central bank: “We did not have a central bank until 1913. That was part of our downfall.” The United States had the First (1791–1811) and Second (1816–1836) Banks of the United States, then a national banking system, before the Federal Reserve was created in 1913.
The imperial or globalist system, in her telling, is the one the American Revolution was fought against: central banking built around the Bank of England, and private cartels such as the British East India Company, whose modern successors she sees in global corporations. It no longer depends on Britain’s power as a nation; London is simply its headquarters. She points to the City of London’s role in setting commodity, currency and insurance prices, to the Bank of England, and to the British monarchy, which she calls “far from a figurehead.”
Today, she says, the system works through institutions and people at the top: the World Economic Forum; Chatham House in London and its “sister organization”, the Council on Foreign Relations in New York; the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the climate bodies; and figures such as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, George Soros, Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates. Carney, she says, has been the most explicit, couching the agenda “in terms of rules-based order, free trade, climate agenda.”
These institutions differ more than the list suggests. The IMF and the World Bank are intergovernmental bodies, created at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, where the American plan of Harry Dexter White largely won out over John Maynard Keynes’s; the US is their largest shareholder. The World Economic Forum is a private Swiss foundation. Chatham House (1920) and the Council on Foreign Relations (1921) do share an origin: British and American delegates at the 1919 Paris peace conference planned a joint Anglo-American institute, then founded separate ones. The “rules-based order” is not a treaty but a shorthand for the post-1945 system of international rules, institutions and alliances.
125 years of “infiltration”
Kokinda’s most sweeping claim is that “there’s been a very deliberate policy for over 125 years” to hide the fact that this system never went away. She dates it to 1901, when President William McKinley, whom she calls “our last American System president”, was assassinated: “literally halfway between today and the Declaration of Independence.” McKinley ran on high tariffs and industrial development, and Trump has often praised him.
After that, she argues, knowledge of the American System was gradually erased, and the empire chose to work through America’s institutions rather than against them, to “make us their dumb giant.” Influence over universities, the media and public opinion is enough:
“Once they control the institutions that shape your thinking, that shape public opinion, they don’t have to have fingertip control over everything. They’ve essentially recruited the population into an ideology which ends up being self-destructive.” Susan Kokinda
Her main example is free trade: sold to Americans as consumers (“you can buy stuff cheaper”) while it cost them as producers. In the industrial Midwest, she says, people resisted it because “people thought more like producers rather than consumers.” When Trump said he didn’t believe in that consensus, “a lot of people said, ‘Oh, well, maybe I didn’t actually believe it either’”, what some call a great awakening.
The political front line
Kokinda says the main figures on both sides openly admit the fight. On the Trump side she cites Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and two speeches at Davos in January 2026: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told the World Economic Forum that “globalization has failed the West and the United States of America”, and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer praised Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures and Clay’s American System by name. Trump himself, she says, is at least instinctively an American System president: a builder who admires McKinley and says he is rebuilding “the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln.”
She also sees the old bipartisan consensus breaking. For 30 years, she argues, the Democrats and “the old Bush Republicans” backed free trade and the institutions behind it, and she accuses the media and what she calls the “uni party” in Congress of hoping to use “the pain at the pump” to make Trump back down on Iran.
Makori put the critics’ view to her: that Trump is a billionaire surrounded by wealthy people, and that some of his policies have served his and his family’s commercial interests. Kokinda answered that critics “misuse the word oligarchy.” Henry Ford became very rich, she said, but by producing; an oligarchy is “a system which wants to entrench this rule of the few and keep the rest of the population backward so that they can be looted.”
The philosophical core
Underneath the economics, Kokinda frames the conflict as a disagreement about what a human being is. The imperial system, she says, treats people as animals to be managed; the American System treats them as creators who solve problems with “God-given creative reason.” That argument, and her account of how culture and ideology are used in the fight, is the subject of the fifth article in this series.
Where the argument comes from, and what critics say
The framework Kokinda describes, an American System of infrastructure, regulated banking and tariffs set against a British-centred financial empire, has been central to the LaRouche movement for half a century; Promethean Action was formed by former LaRouche collaborators after his death in 2019. Supporters credit the movement with arguing for industrial policy, infrastructure and tariffs long before both parties took those ideas seriously again. Critics, including journalists and researchers who study political extremism, have described it as conspiratorial and cult-like, and LaRouche himself was convicted of fraud in 1988, a case his followers called politically motivated.
Some of the claims in the interview go well beyond the evidence. Promethean Action has published an e-book arguing that the British were behind the killing of American System presidents. The historical record identifies the assassins as Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist (McKinley, 1901), Charles Guiteau, a disappointed office-seeker (Garfield, 1881), and John Wilkes Booth (Lincoln, 1865); Booth’s co-conspirators were tried, and investigators looked for links to Confederate agents, some of whom operated from Canada, but no evidence has ever tied the British government to any of them. Kokinda also dismisses Lee Harvey Oswald’s role in John F. Kennedy’s assassination as one of the “silly cover stories”; the official investigations, from the Warren Commission to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, found no evidence of British involvement.
Economists who disagree with Kokinda’s diagnosis also make three broader points:
- Deindustrialization has ordinary causes. Automation, cheaper labour abroad, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and a strong dollar explain most of the loss of factory jobs, without the need for a coordinated plan.
- Tariffs have costs. They raise prices for consumers and for manufacturers that rely on imported parts, and invite retaliation against exporters.
- The institutions are largely American creations. Washington designed the post-war system, hosts the IMF and the World Bank, and holds an effective veto over the IMF’s biggest decisions.
Even so, the debate Kokinda describes is no longer confined to the fringes. Industrial policy, tariffs, energy independence and whether central banks answer to elected governments are now mainstream questions in Washington, Ottawa and London.
Why it matters for markets
Whatever one makes of the historical argument, the fight over trade, industrial policy and the role of the central bank moves markets. Tariffs feed into inflation, inflation into interest rates, and pressure on the Federal Reserve’s independence into the dollar and into demand for gold, an asset that is no government’s liability. The 3 November midterm elections will decide how much room the administration has to keep pushing in that direction. How gold has moved after past midterms is on the gold after US midterm elections page, and the history of the Fed’s policy rate is on the fed funds rate page.
The series: 1. The great systemic clash · 2. Triffin, debt and gold: is a “Bretton Woods 2.0” on Trump’s table? · 3. Tariffs, tax breaks and credit: is America’s factory revival real? · 4. Sovereignty versus empire: Iran, Ukraine and a Trump–Putin–Xi summit · 5. The “image of man”: culture, ideology and the fight over Western civilization.
This article summarizes the views Susan Kokinda expressed in an interview with Miles Franklin Media (31 October 2026), with historical context and opposing views added by Corgano. Her views are her own. This article is commentary; it is not investment, tax or financial advice.
