American Dream v. American Fantasies

Your Silverado v. My Lexus

Mr. Trump, to be sure, is a certified miracle worker. In his first term he managed to turn dovish Democrats into flaming Russia hawks. Less than 100 days into his second term, he’s already converted the Democrats into Milton Friedmanite free traders. Give him a third term, and the Democrats will demand a return to the gold standard.

—Walter Russell Mead

Well, that’s not quite true…but it feels truthy. The truth is that left-wing populists enabled the right-wing demagogic populism of Donald Trump. He never could have happened without their fecklessness. For example:

My Toyota Camry drowned in a Florida rainstorm so, in a fit of classic American optimism, I traded up and got a Lexus. (It’s the same car essentially, with better service and not much more expensive). Back north, I was pulling into a parking lot the other day, and a man in Chevy Silverado pickup truck gave me a vehement thumbs down. I lowered my window and asked, “What’s your problem?”

“You’re driving a Jap car!”

“And do you know where your car was assembled?” I asked. He gave me the finger.

As it happens, the Silverado is assembled in five locations—three in these here United States, another in Mexico, another in Canada. As for parts, it’s hard to tell. The automotive relationship between the US and Canada is so intertwined that it’s impossible to say what’s made where—but about 37% of the parts come from those two countries, and another 37% from Mexico. And the rest from elsewhere in the world.

Punch line: My Lexus is assembled in Georgetown, Kentucky. (Although, yes, many of the parts come from Japan.)

Point of the Story: The horse has left the barn. Attempts to onshore automobile-manufacturing will be foiled by an essential truth: The industry is hopelessly, and happily, international, a prime example of the efficiencies of globalization. The tariff-loving United Auto Workers having been howling at the moon—and are about to suffer for their myopia. The Washington Post reports this morning that 470 auto workers have been laid off “temporarily” from a Stellantis plant in Kokomo, Ind. (Stellantis took over Chrysler; Jeep, that iconic “American” vehicle, is a Stellantis product. The company is headquartered near Amsterdam in The Netherlands, with manufacturing facilities in the US, Italy and France.)

Now, you might wonder if the laid off Stellantis workers, who trend toward Trumpery, have lost any faith in their boy. Nope.

Fayne Parr, 59, oversees a production line at Stellantis’s Indiana Transmission Plant and was among workers forced into a two-week layoff blamed on the tariffs. He’s hopeful Trump’s trade policy will bring more jobs to the area. For now, he’s not worried about the lost income, as he can collect unemployment benefits and the company’s supplemental benefit that give him about 85 percent of his regular pay.

“I don’t want to b---- about the tariffs,” he said. “They might be a good thing. I just don’t know yet. They might be a great thing.”

For the past several decades, Mr. Parr’s union—the UAW—has been telling him that tariffs will save the auto industry. It is part of the prevailing fantasy of the labor-aggrandizing left wing of the Democratic Party: Trump won because he took our argument. It is an argument that politicians, like the warm and fuzzy but profoundly mediocre governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, are peddling throughout the midwest. Walz apparently believes he has a future in national politics:

“What Donald Trump did very well was, he identified that people were hurting. They watched their jobs go overseas. They watched it [becoming] hard to buy a house. They didn’t believe health care was working very well. They didn’t believe it was fair how they were being treated. All those things were pretty true,” Walz said. “Now, I contend he helped cause that problem and didn’t do a damn thing to fix it, but he correctly identifies with them, and then sees that space to say, ‘We hear you.’”

All too often in politics, American Dreams are American Fantasies. There is some truth to Walz’s argument, but it is 30 years out of date. Jobs were lost in Ohio, but they were gained in Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina. In a global economy, unions became anachronistic when it became clear that it was too hard for them to go international—even unions like the UAW, which claims 10,000 members in Canada. Indeed, Democrats also “helped cause the problem and didn’t do a damn thing to fix it” by not telling the truth about cars. Or about housing, which was stalled by NIMBY protesters in the guise of environmental fanatics. Or about health care, which 80% of Americans say they’re happy with..

The problem in the auto industry was, progress happened. The bitter wages of capitalism alleviated poverty throughout the world. No doubt, progress could have been massaged a bit—both Democrats and Republicans could have played a more nuanced game, offered major incentives to keep silicon chips and a few other crucial industries operating onshore. Joe Biden started the process of, perhaps, repatriating some of those—for which he will not get credit; Trump will take it. But those who imagine that the smokestacks of the 1950’s will resume their serried ranks in places like Kokomo are delusional. The factories of the future will be robotic, powered by AI—and yes, jobs will come with them, but they will require knowledge of computers and electronics, or not much knowledge at all (cleaners and cafeteria workers).

I remember Bill Clinton going to a UAW Hall in sainted Macomb County, Michigan in the midst of the 1992 presidential campaign and actually telling the truth, amidst the lip service he paid in opposition to “outsourcing.” Workers were going to have to retrain for the jobs of the future. Muscle labor was being supplanted by brain labor. This involved education and technical training…and maybe bigger paychecks, if they put in the work and upsized the space between their ears.

The labor left hated Clinton because he acknowledged the obvious. The cultural left hated Clinton because he acknowledged crime was a problem, that more cops and prisons were needed, and that the welfare system was broken. The bond market—not a classic Democratic cheering section—loved Clinton because he acknowledged that the federal deficit was a problem. The left may have hated it, but people knew truth when they heard it.

I haven’t heard any such truths from Walz or the other liberals attempting to salvage the poisoned Democratic brand. I haven’t seen any courage. I haven’t seen an argument to counter Trump’s flagrant—and dangerous—reverse-trafficking of illegal immigrants like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran “mistakenly” sent back to prison in his home country. Or his decision to stiff the snooty Ivies like Harvard.

In the end, we can speculate that Trump’s position on auto tariffs will lose. And that his idiotic mangling of government-funded research at elite universities will be costly and dangerous. And we can hope that the need for immigrant labor will become obvious as wages soar and jobs are left undone. In the meantime, though, Trump will be empowered to do questionable, half-baked authoritarian things because that is precisely what people want him to do.

When Democrats like Tim Walz and Bernie Sanders and AOC give credence to Trump’s Populist Fantasies, they simply empower Trump. They need to offer alternatives—the actual truth about the future of manufacturing, the benefits we gain from the pittance spent on foreign aid (even if most “working” Americans oppose it), the need to support our allies; and also, at home, the need to support the police and take violent schizophrenics off the streets. There is the need to acknowledge that homelessness was a problem caused by casual social policies and too-liberal judges; that identity politics went way too far—that “working” Americans turned on the Dems because they thought liberals cared too much about they/them at the expense of the rest of us. Democrats need to campaign for true, necessary things like the expansion legal immigration. They need to acknowledge the reality of the bond market, especially if Trump won’t. They need to support law and order, as Trump isn’t. Politicians are allowed the luxury of rosy scenarios; it’s near impossible, as Trump may learn, to induce bad news and be rewarded. The way back to respectability is through truth, strength and courage—not by indulging fantasies that will soon be proven illusory.