Will America Get Another Chance?

The post-WWII boom made two generations of Americans remarkably prosperous.  The generation who fought the war and their children lived in a time when America ran the world politically and economically.  The captains of industry were in a position to expand their businesses on a scale never before seen.  American companies dominated the global market in just about every major category of manufacturing.  That expansion employed two generations of Americans in a way that hadn’t been seen before.  Americans came to believe that each generation would be richer and happier than the one before.  Everyone would have a nice home.  Everyone’s kids would go to college.  Everyone would prosper.

Now the 1970s was the first wake-up call.  With an energy crisis and a financial crisis and the first big recession in twenty-five years Americans were worried and confused.  But along came Ronald Reagan and the wonders of deregulation and before you know it “Greed is good” and the good times are rolling again.

But what nobody noticed, or at least no one in the big cities noticed was that corporate America had decided that employing Americans was too expensive and unnecessary.  So slowly but surely, they moved their manufacturing operations off-shore.  They went to Mexico and the Philippines.  They went to Japan, South Korea, China, then Thailand, Vietnam and finally Myanmar.  Anywhere except here.  So, thirty years later the rust belt now looks like a third world nation.  Towns and cities are filled with houses that haven’t been painted in decades.  Main streets are full of abandoned and dilapidated commercial and industrial properties.  In fact, the towns are now empty of young people.  Only the old people are hanging on, living off their social security and the dregs of their savings.

In the big coastal cities, there were still white-collar jobs to be had running these nominally American corporations.  And tech companies provided high paying jobs for IT professionals.  But in the last ten years even these jobs are more and more being off-shored.  The hollowing out of the American work force is almost complete.  There are still jobs at hospitals and government agencies that are tasked with servicing the needs of the human flotsam and jetsam that are still clinging to life in the battered US economy.  There have to be jobs for Democrat voters after all.

So, the second generation after the WWII generation, the Millennials were the first generation to discover that they would be worse off than their parents.  And the next generation after that is acutely aware how bad things are out there.  None of that post war optimism exists.  But what lingers is the sense that Americans have been double crossed.  They’ve been sold out by corporate America but more correctly, they been sold out by the federal government that allowed these corporations to abandon their countrymen to joblessness and poverty.  They allowed the states that they supposedly represented to be picked clean of factories and warehouses and retail businesses.  They were paid off to ignore the dismantling of the industrial base of the United States of America.

Well, it’s already done.  No one will be going to jail for it.  George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton got their cut.  Obama did too.  And George W. Bush sent all those unemployed Midwesterners to Iraq to be blown up by maniacs with road-side IEDs.  That’s ancient history now.

But that sense of being double crossed still lingers among the dispossessed but still living victims.  I guess the only question is will there be any kind of attempt to save what’s left of America’s people?  Donald Trump did something.  He called out the outrageous trade deals that his predecessors inflicted on us.  He boosted energy production and even did something to try and get some jobs brought back here.  So of course, they unleashed COVID and the BLM riots to crash the economy.  Then Dementia Joe applied the coup de grâce.  He shut down the energy industries and unleashed hyperinflation.

Assume that Americans successfully pry the federal elective offices of President and Congress away from the Democrats in 2022 and 2024.  Will the Republicans follow the lead of Trump or his successor to try and force corporate America to reinvest in this country?  Sure, they’ll be busy trying to clean out the Deep State (if they’re interested in anything more than business as usual) but just as important is fixing the economy.  And the only way to do that is to return all those manufacturing jobs.  But will they do it?  If they don’t there won’t be a generation after the one growing up now.  That’s simple arithmetic.  No jobs, no families.