The nostalgia economy
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President Trump said on Truth Social today that he had a great call with South Korea's leader aimed at making a deal on the tariffs that have set the global economy on edge. In that same post, Trump said he's waiting for China to call. The administration says these Liberation Day tariffs will bring manufacturing jobs back to America. Why is that so important? There are some really dumb ways to answer that question. When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this. Studies have shown this. And some much smarter ones.
This is a policy at the end of the day that's oriented toward helping some of the folks who have really been the losers in the economy and have been left behind for a long time.
Coming up on Today Explained, the best minds. The White House advisor who's gone ham on tariffs defends his position.
Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we are launching our much-anticipated book club, and we're doing it with Abby Wambach and Glennon Doyle, who will introduce their upcoming book, We Can Do Hard Things, Answers to Life's 20 Questions. Plus, we've got some fun and important updates from The W and the NWSL, and of course, we've got a new Are You a Megan or Are You a Sue? Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
I always say tariffs is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary.
It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Senior correspondent Eric Levitz recently wrote for Vox about the nostalgia that the Trump administration feels for a time when American manufacturing was at its peak. Manufacturing things in the U.S. makes a lot of sense if we're talking about stuff that we want to get ahead on, cutting-edge technologies like semiconductor chips, for example. It's arguably a pretty good idea to put tariffs on chips that are coming in from elsewhere.
But that's not what Trump is doing. He's putting tariffs on absolutely everything, you know, clothing from Vietnam and Bangladesh, coffee, which we can't even grow at scale in the United States, from South America. He's putting them on everything, and especially industrial goods, including low-value industrial goods like T-shirts, kitchen mitts, etc., That is not a policy vision aimed at America thriving in the industries of the future. It's a policy vision aimed at bringing America decades backwards in our economic development. The explanation for this can't be a rational economic one, but more of an emotional one, a nostalgic longing for an America that no longer exists.
What is the America that did exist? What's the thing that the Trump administration is nostalgic for?
The Nationalist Right has this narrative in which we used to have these really tight-knit communities anchored by stable families in which the male breadwinner worked in a factory. And this not only allowed for working class wage growth and upward mobility and the achievement of the american dream but also for these really healthy family arrangements stable two-parent homes and generally a form of communitarian life that the religious right really values and then there also is this gender element to it where a manufacturing economy puts a premium on brute physical strength, or at least the manufacturing economy of the mid-20th century. These were predominantly male jobs. And, you know, this connection between the nostalgia for manufacturing and the nostalgia for a kind of different set of gender relations was made really explicit by a speech from Republican Senator Josh Hawley in 2021, where he said...
Domestic manufacturing once supported millions of American men with good wages, who in turn started and supported families. Now that industry lies all but dead on what? The altar of globalism.
And so they tell this story that you hear in a lot of Trump's speeches, in the speeches of other right-wing nationalists, in which deindustrialization, the closing of factories, is synonymous with both economic devastation and decline and moral rot.
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