From free marketeers to protectionist reactionaries
Republicans have abandoned their core economic beliefs for Trump's attempt to recreate a Leave It to Beaver fantasy world.
Donald Trump is folding in his trade war without offering Americans much benefit. He’s reducing his tariffs on China, but not enough to avoid higher prices for American families. It’s almost stunning to see the Party of Reagan go along with his protectionist schemes. The goals of his economic policies are diametrically opposed to those that made up the ideological foundation of the GOP for the past fifty years.
Starting in the 1980s, Republicans preached free market economics with evangelical zeal. They ended protections for industries that were the lifeblood of large swaths of the American Midwest and South. Whole regions were gutted and the free marketeers reshaped our economy, ignoring the pain while touting the benefits of cheap goods and high paying jobs in a booming tech sector.
We can argue today about wisdom of the trade agreements of the 1980s and 1990s, but the pain is largely over, even if some of the areas adversely effected have never recovered. All that’s left is resentment—and a lot of it. Our economy is now based more on technology and knowledge than manufacturing. Our universities and technical schools train young people in data management, not plastic injection molding. The jobs that went overseas aren’t coming back, in part, because they no longer exist due to technologies developed here that made them obsolete.
The party that pushed free market extremism is now unified in exploiting the resentment of those left behind in an economy that values discovering and developing things more than building them. They promise to bring back the jobs of the past by, get this, ending the free market principles that built the modern world. It won’t work.
Or if it does, we’ll have to go through the same pain we went through to get where we are today. Only this time, we’ll see prices skyrocket for years as well as jobs disappearing until new ones can replace them. Technical schools and community colleges equipped to train a workforce for the knowledge-based economy will need to retool to teach them manufacturing jobs that have been performed in China and the developing world. Rebuilding new industrial complexes or refurbishing old ones will take years, not months.
All of this restructuring would also depend on the rest of the world following Trump’s lead. That’s not likely. They don’t trust him and they aren’t willing to drag their people through the pain that Trump and the GOP are willing to cause American citizens in search of some sort of “Leave It to Beaver” fantasy world.
Instead of trying to go back to the future, the parties should address the real ills of globalization. The wealth created by free market polices remained too concentrated in too few hands. At the same time we were opening markets all over the world, Republicans slashed taxes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations. Workers in manufacturing facilities that had benefits and protections largely due to unionization were forced into an unorganized service sector for lower wages and fewer benefits.
Shareholders, management, and entrepreneurs have done great in the free market world. Workers have not. As a country, we’re not just divided by ideology, MAGA versus Woke, we’re divide by those who benefited from free market policies and those who didn’t. The key is not to reverse what’s already been done. The answer is to make sure the wealth is shared more broadly.
Raise the minimum wage. Provide better benefits to ensure people who lose their jobs though no fault of their own don’t end up in poverty. Encourage organized labor in the service industry. And tax the rich. Forty-five years of shifting the tax burden from corporations and the wealthy to the working and middle class has been the fertilizer of resentment and discontent.
I say all of this to encourage people to recognize that Donald Trump is addressing the real concerns of a lot of Americans, even if his solutions are empirically wrong and his reasoning reactive and exploitive. Help people see that the threat to their economic well-being comes less from immigrants than the concentration of wealth.
Turning back the clock is not the answer. Demanding a bigger slice of the pie for middle Americans is. Workers deserve better wages, health care, pensions, and benefits than they’ve received. The rich have gotten richer while the working class has borne the brunt of the Great Recession and the pandemic. Fixing that inequality will take time, too, but we won’t be waiting for factories to materialize that may never appear.
If anybody should go back to the future, it’s the Democrats. They need to find their populist, pro-worker roots to demand a fair shake for the working class. Republicans have proven to be a reactionary party, chucking their ideology for authoritarian impulses. They are more concerned with protecting their wealthy benefactors while cynically exploiting pain of working class Americans. Democrats need to step up.
During one of his more infamous televised remarks, Trump dismissed concerns about an impending recession with analogies that trivialized economic hardship. He likened financial struggles to a child receiving only a few dolls at Christmas instead of an abundance or having a limited number of pencils rather than a surplus. These comparisons, however, do little to acknowledge the real crisis—Americans grappling with job losses, home foreclosures, and the erosion of their financial security and dignity.
This suffering is not merely the product of economic cycles; it is a direct consequence of Trump’s self-fashioned crusade, one that caters to his most fervent supporters while undermining those who serve in government, pursue education, and once believed in America as a land of opportunity. The upcoming midterms present a critical juncture—perhaps our last chance to halt this chaos—before reckless decision-making drags us into unnecessary conflict, jeopardizing relationships with long-standing allies. We will show the world how we deal with arrogant incompetence; we impeach the bastards.
I agree up to a point. Democrats have been the pro worker, pro union party all along. All of the bills and laws that they pass when they are in power are for the working class and the poor. Joe Biden walked the line with union members in Michigan. Republicans do nothing for the working class but somehow have them fooled. I think too many working class and poor people vote against their own self interest in favor of racism, misogamy, sexism, etc.