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Notes -
More on Trump's tariffs.
I ran into a very interesting comment on reddit last night:
To which I respond... yes. That's exactly right. Suppose ICE actually deports enough illegals to cause significant shortages in farming, roofing, factory work, construction, etc. Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?
The author of this comment would immediately answer with "well, he's so fat and lazy that he ain't gonna, so there". To which my response is, very well! Then we shall all go without roofs. Now of course, people are capable of far more than you expect them to be once their backs are actually up against the wall. People will leap into action if there's no other choice. But, supposing he's right and it does turn out that no one answers the call, then we shall simply go without. A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without. This, I imagine, is one of the core ethical commitments that separates MAGA from its opponents.
Are we actually going to deport enough illegals to make a difference? Probably not. Is anyone in the administration consciously implementing the program I've described here? It may have occurred to someone in passing, but it's probably not written down in a secret master plan anywhere. But still, you can see here, dimly, the outline of a program that would actually give Trump's base exactly what they wanted, in a very direct way. Which is pretty neat.
The dream held by parents around the world is not 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines - I hope that my child will live the same life,' it is 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines so that my child doesn't have to.' Rather than grubbing around in the dirt with a hoe, we built massive tractors and combines to the work of dozens? Hundreds? of men. And more cynically, we outsourced the production lines to Bangladesh and roofing houses to illegals. But boomers and their children got to put on their white collars and push papers around in an office all day! Or, you know, become neets and shitpost on 4chan.
Tell me, do Chinese people tell their children to dream of a job on the production line or do they force them to study 20 hours a day for the gaokao in hopes of escaping a life of manual labor to do the white collar jobs that you sneer at? The future is not retvrning to backbreaking labor, but forging a new path that avoids both the perils of neetdom and the grievances of the dispossessed. The future lies in recognizing our love of zero-sum status games and squaring that with a world where there's fewer and fewer high-status jobs to go around.
Really...? When is the last time you heard MAGA supporters agitating for cuts to welfare and entitlements because those who do not provide for themselves, should go without? When has Trump ever supported anything resembling what you just said? The core ethical commitment that separates MAGA from the rest of the country is a revanchist bent to make the libs/globalists/elites suffer as they have. The reaction to the supreme court striking down Roe v. Wade wasn't jubilation about saving the unborn (although I did hear of some Catholic circles where this was the case), it was gloating about how arrogant Hillary and RBJ were in assuming that the arc of history was inevitably bending their way as they girlbossed their way to grinding the deplorables beneath their high heels. The reaction to DOGE isn't that cutting government spending would improve the union (see: all the arguments regarding the magnitude of the spending cut versus the actual federal budget), it was joy at the suffering of entitled, lazy government bureaucrats and globalists who care more about HIV in Africa than fentanyl abuse in the rust belt.
Whether the anger is justified is a whole other conversation, but consider this: If MAGA were forced to choose between 1) a debatably prosperous country where libs in New York and San Francisco flourished via tech/healthcare/finance and MAGA strongholds stagnated or 2) crushing the 'globalist agenda' and doing to those industries what was done to manufacturing, with questionable benefit to MAGA strongholds, which do you think they would choose?
If you take away the animus for the libs, the MAGA coalition collapses. You see it here where there is largely consensus against any kind of woke topic, but bitter arguments around the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the tariffs.
Happily, MAGA does not have to choose between just the two options you listed. There is a middle path where the globalist agenda is crushed via onshoring manufacturing which yes, will increase costs for the coastal elite who own big corporations, but will also raise wages for the working and middle class.
I think it is a serious error to assume the MAGA coalition is held together by a desire to "own the libs". Thats what some figures may cathartically tweet about, but the actual voters that matter care about their jobs, the cost of groceries and morgtages, and their kids education. On all of these the proggo left has failed misrably the past few years, which is why in 2024 the GOP, not the DNC, won the lion's share of the working class vote.
Do you actually expect that onshoring manufacturing will raise wages (relative to the cost of goods and services) for the majority of working-class and middle-class Americans? Have similar approaches worked in the past?
Yes, because yes. 1945-1979 saw a massive expansion in the American manufacturing sector with wages that were, adjusting for inflation, median wages, and CoL, comparatively much higher than they are today. Now will a new American manufacturing boom look like that one? No, it will be much more heavily automated and high tech, but the funny thing about robots is they still need a large number of people to operate, maintain, repair, upgrade, and pioneer more uses for them. A factory I worked at actually hired more workers despite completely automating the actual assembly line and ended up passing out a lot of raises as people skilled up.
Shit that will never happen. Building a factory takes longer than these tariffs will ever last, which is just under four years tops if Trump is willing to let the entire GOP burn to death in the midterms. This is a historic fuckup, Trump just metaphorically blew his brains out on live TV with this shit.
You should consider that the odds of "literal war with China" happening in the next four years is relatively high, possibly 100%, the odds of the US winning are decent, and if Trump gets the US started onshoring before obliterating the industrial capacity of our main rival (which is why the US had such a nice industry between 1945 - 1979) before that happens he might be hailed as a hero and genius.
The odds of me shitting my pants in the next five minutes are possibly 100%. I probably won't, but if I do then I guess the odds were 100% all along. Also you're not obliterating the industrial capacity of China WW2-style with anything less than carpet-nuking.
No, what I mean is that it is possibly already baked in – I dunno how likely this is but Trump, as POTUS, may know that we're going to war with China in less than four years.
On the one hand, touché.
On the other hand, Chinese trade flows through overseas shipping. A war with Taiwan might involve carpet nuking levels of destruction (the Three Gorges Dam is within Taiwanese striking range) but is more likely to involve interdicting Chinese trade routes and might also involve striking their port assets. If China loses the war, its fleet, its merchant marine, and its port infrastructure, even without destroying industrial capacity or critical infrastructure it will hamper their exports for years.
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If the US goes to war with China it will have to be over Taiwan. Now, given that the American right has spent the last year + in outrage at the notion of sending military aid to help a foreign nation, what do you think the reaction would be if Trump declared war in a situation where the Chinese claims are way more credible than any of the Russian bullshit. I know MAGA world hates China, but after spending years positioning itself as the remedy to failed interventionist establishment foreign policy, declaring war on China seems difficult to square with that.
After the Chinese kill American service members? Forget Trump declaring war, Congress will.
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