This Poll on Factory Workers Is the Hypocrisy of American Politics in a Nutshell
Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust via Unsplash
American politics runs on nostalgia. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, although it has very clearly become one in a country where neither party has a coherent plan for the future past an acceptance of our budding dystopia. It’s good for a nation to look to its past successes as guideposts for the future, but only if the path forward is the primary focus. American politics is broken because of a million different reasons, but one clear consequence of looking behind you all the time is running head-on into a brick wall in front of you. As the present de-dollarization of the world proves while the once unthinkable unfolds before our eyes, sometimes the past does not provide a handy guide to a wholly unpredictable future.
Americans look up to great women and men throughout our history and we each fashion ourselves as one, and this is another double-edged sword in a country that a political science professor of mine once described as “a bunch of folks popping wheelies on motorcycles while riding along the lip of a volcano.” The gobsmacking audaciousness of America is responsible for both our greatest triumphs and our lowest moments, as we have proven that our ingenuity, empathy and evil knows no bounds. Our ignorance too. A big reason why the American economy is the most powerful in history is because the beginning of the 20th century was spent flattening all manufacturing capacity across Europe and Asia, providing us with a half-century-long head start on the scaling of the Industrial Revolution. America’s mid-century manufacturing prowess is a point of pride for good reason, but at its origin lies the sacrifices that London, Paris and a litany of other cities across the world made long before we decided to pick a side in World War II, not some unique American achievement.
If you really want to dig into the darkest parts of an economist’s brain, World War II can also be described as one of the greatest economic stimulus programs in human history, and America is proof. At a time when the country was still struggling to climb out of the deep hole of the Great Depression, it moved men into a high-demand labor force utilizing a lot of very expensive products that we manufactured ourselves through a process of rapid industrialization. Not to mention, women began to replace the void these men created in the domestic workforce, and American economic might flexed its muscles with each bomb dropped on Berlin and with each Ford off the assembly line after the German defeat. This 20th century manufacturing revolution that powered us out of a crisis of the 19th century’s making has a big influence on our current budding economic crisis where a president wants to drag us back to the 19th century to do it all over again. Trump appeals to bringing back American manufacturing in his bid to convince people of the efficacy of the biggest economic own-goal in human history because again, unfortunately, this doddering dipshit often knows us better than we know ourselves.
The bipartisan belief that America would be a better place if *other people* worked in a factory.
www.ft.com/content/8459…