I realize that Donald Trump said many of these same things. In that, he was just echoing the message that nearly won Bernie Sanders the Democratic nomination in 2016 and keeps Sherrod Brown comfortably ensconced in his Senate seat from Ohio.
While neoliberalism was brought to America by Reagan, Clinton jumped on the bandwagon, too, so opposing it has been an uneasy task for both Republicans and Democrats for the past three decades. Trump's willingness to challenge that neoliberal consensus and speak the truth (in his own confused way) had to account for far more than just his Electoral College margin of victory in 2016.
Nonetheless, even though most Americans don't know the gory details or history I've laid out here, they do know that we used to make things in America and it made us rich, and we no longer make much here (outside of guns and military weaponry) and it's making us poor.
Back in the day when neoliberals were leading the free trade charge with Tom Friedman's book The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization we at least had a robust discussion of its impact. Ross Perot took almost 20% of the vote for president in 1992 because American voters were so horrified about the "giant sucking sound from the south" he accurately predicted would happen if neoliberal trade policies were put into place.
Perot, it turns out, was right. As were Henry VII, Alexander Hamilton, and Deng Xiaoping.
Now that the Covid pandemic has exposed the fragility of this insane system, it's time for America to revisit that conversation, both to recover our gutted middle class and to ensure our national security.
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