When justifying economic populism, politicians and thinkers from both the left and right constantly complain about trade with China and what it did to the American heartland. Trump of course is the political figure most associated with anti-trade views, but in 2000 Bernie Sanders came out against establishing permanent trade relations with China, which he saw as “a vehicle for companies to send jobs to a country that allows its workers to be paid 20 cents an hour.”
I remember when I beat Grand Theft Auto V, one of the endings has the three main characters murdering an obnoxious tech bro, and one of the reasons they tell him he deserves to die before slamming the trunk and pushing the car off the cliff is that he offshores jobs to save money. This showed me that economic populism of a nationalist bent has deep cultural roots.
Such views have gotten a boost in the last few years from what is called the “China Shock” literature, which has been seized on by protectionists to argue for their preferred policies. There has been a bipartisan turn towards hawkishness on China, with Biden having kept many of the trade restrictions put on by the first Trump administration, and adding more on top of them. The second Trump administration has of course taken the trade war to a new level.
This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers of the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.
I’ve been saying for years that anyone, from either party, telling voters that manufacturing jobs are coming back because of this or that policy, is committing a heinous act equal to telling a child that their terminally ill parent is gonna pull through.
"One more thing to note here is how crazy it is that we’re so obsessed with this one type of work."
It's because it is perceived as being particularly good for relatively stupid, unsophisticated men. Or "real men" as people who romanticize such men probably consider them. The populist right frets over relatively stupid, unsophisticated men the way the woke left frets over black people.
There's also lingering romanticizing of them on the left because the left still traffics in stupid Marxist ideas, often without even realizing it. In this case, the working class isn't just the people you are trying to save from capitalist exploitation, but they are the demographic possessed of some magical gnostic wisdom that will let them overthrow the capitalist order and then something something utopia. This is the central problem/paradox of Marxism. It's supposed to rally the industrial working class, but the industrial working class largely doesn't care about this, and the radicals you actually get are educated elites and literal peasants who want land redistribution. Communist revolutions happen in peasant quasi feudal societies, not industrialized ones.
Meanwhile, normies are populist in general and picture cliche imaginary assembly line man with a Ford, a picket fence, a housewife, two kids, and a dog as being "someone like me" as opposed to tech bros or finance bros or whatever. I think the reason they fixate on this meme in particular instead of, say, truck drivers or construction workers is literally just advertising. People also romanticize antiquated farming practices for similar reasons. The supermarket has pictures of big red barns and spotted cows grazing in green grass, not CAFOs or vat grown beef. Meanwhile, nobody thinks cottage garment production is romantic. You don't see pictures of happy peasant women in a knitting circle in the clothes department even though such imagery is also nostalgia inducing.