Trumpocalypse now: Trump has no interest in reviving manufacturing, but there is an alternative

Pity the liberals, so incapable of comprehending the meaning of Trump that they can't even get their memes right. One that made the rounds in the aftershock of Trump's election was a still from The Road, the 2009 film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel, in which Viggo Mortenson, wheeling a shopping trolley of possessions through the gathering nuclear winter, argues with his boy: 'But son, her emails'. As with the election itself, the joke's on us. The Road was filmed, in part, in rustbelt areas of Pennsylvania and West Virginia that had been devastated by decades of Clintonian neoliberalism. These bleak landscapes of post-industrial collapse are the condition and not the consequence of Trump's success. The apocalypse, for many, is already here-it's just unevenly distributed.

It's hard to convey the full magnitude of the economic destruction that has been visited upon America's manufacturing heartland. In a great arc running from upstate New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio along Lake Erie, and on into Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, community after community has been destabilised by successive waves of deindustrialisation. Whole cities have been thrown away, entire regions left behind, as firms picked up and moved elsewhere-first to the non-union Sunbelt, then to Mexico and China-leaving behind empty factories and houses, and half-empty schools, hospitals, and public buildings. The capital, carbon and human costs have been immense. Cleveland has lost half a million people since 1950, 57 per cent of its population. In Detroit, it's more than a million, over 60 per cent; of those remaining, over a third live below the poverty line.

The seeds of destruction were sown in the corporate restructurings of the 1970s and 1980s, which led to massive downsizings and layoffs in an aggressive pursuit of shareholder value. Even workers' own savings were mobilised against them, when the huge pools of capital accumulated by their occupational pension funds were used by the financial services industry to export their jobs through overseas investment.¹ Repeated rounds of trade liberalisation have caused the United States to run a goods trade deficit every year since 1976. Then came the ramming through, in the Clinton era, of the remainder of the neoliberal programme, masked in part by a synthetic boom built on tech, the low-wage service sector and the carceral state. Over five million manufacturing jobs have been lost since the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect, the bulk of them since 2000 and the institution of permanent normal trade relations with China.

For the American worker, these were locust years-decades of low growth, high unemployment and compounding inequality. Real wages for 80 per cent of workers have been largely flat for at least three decades, while virtually all the gains to the economy have been captured by the very rich.² Inequality has reached Gilded Age levels, with the top 1 per cent now claiming 22 per cent of all income-their largest share since 1929.³ Wealth is even more concentrated, with the top 10 per cent commanding three quarters of the total.⁴ Forty per cent of families are living from payday to payday, with almost no savings to fall back on in the event of job loss, sickness or other emergency.⁵ The Obama economy saw the weakest, most lopsided recovery from any of the eleven recessions since 1945.⁶ Anger is boiling over at a system people know is stacked against them. An election-day poll found 72 per cent agreeing that 'the economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful'.⁷

Trump ran hard against neoliberal finance and trade in both the primary and the general election. There's no doubt that many blue-collar voters in the abandoned towns of the Rustbelt and rural Appalachia were willing to give him a chance. Trump flipped a third of the counties that had been previously carried twice by Obama. With them came the electoral votes of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa-and the...