The Rhetoric of Deindustrializers: Thoughts

Once upon a time it was common for the champions of economic orthodoxy to dispute the fact of America's deindustrialization. Some of these would say that really everything was fine, better than fine, that the closure of steel mills and auto plants and other durables-producing heavy manufacturing facilities so painfully felt in the Midwest as the old Steel Belt became the Rust Belt was actually a sign of economic renewal, the "sunset" industries of the dirty old smokestack type making way for the clean new "sunrise" industries of the FUTURE! The brilliant economy of the "information age" people like Alvin Toffler were talking about where everything would come from the control of--INFORMATION! Others admitted that there was a problem, but regarded the setbacks as minor and quite easily fixable, without the need for any sort of government intervention. (An industrial policy? Heavens no! Just trust in the entrepreneurs to save the day!) Still others admitted that the problem was not so small, but that it simply had to be borne because government is so inherently worthless as an economic manager, turning everything it touches to crap, or because "globalization" was a force that could not be stopped, or both, so that public action would be as futile as it was harmful and it entirely up to the American worker to embrace the Way of the Market rather than whine "Who moved my cheese?"

The denials of deindustrialization's reality and significance already looked flimsy to every intelligent observer in the 1980s. After all, contrary to the propaganda those who spoke of deindustrialization were not simply reacting emotionally to the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs, real and worrisome as that was. They also noticed that in spite of the promises that the Reagan tax cuts, regulation-killing, labor-crushing and monetary devaluation would prompt a surge of competitiveness-renewing industrial investment no such surge ever materialized; that the manufacturing trade surplus that paid the country's way had become a structural manufacturing trade deficit of unheard of proportions; that key sectors such as the machine tools sector without which no country may be considered a first-rate economic power (the lathe is not so rudimentary), were dying. They also knew that all this was entirely predictable given any honest reading of the empirical facts of history, and the body of theory built on that which enabled America to become an industrial superpower in the first place. And it was testimony to their comprehension of the situation's substance that dissenting observers, and the broader public, challenged the orthodoxy again--albeit to no real effect, election after election seeing the public betrayed on this score in the manner exemplified by the contrast between Bill Clinton's campaign platform in that key election of '92 and actual policy record afterward.

The result was that in spite of endless corporate welfare (not least by way of the military-industrial complex and the shale boom a fossil fuel-loving government happily enabled]) things kept going from bad to worse in ways few could ignore. Admittedly economists drew a veil of obscurity over the matters of industrial investment and output with specious claims about technological change rendering attempts to identify historical trends in the data wrong-headed--such that few registered how the previously heady growth of the manufacturing sector's assets and value added stagnated after the 1970s (with the figures for value added in the traditional heavy industrial areas collapsing). However, seeing General Motors going hat in hand to Congress for bailout because they had become more financial house than auto maker and really blown it; and wondering what ever happened to that American icon Thomas Edison's General Electric (wasn't that "genius" Jack Welch supposed to have "made it great again?"); and noticing that the country's principal export was oil, while its imports now included (Russian!) rocket engines for Pentagon satellite launches; complacency was increasingly confined to the most fanatical free trade ideologues. Indeed, the success of Donald Trump in campaigning on this very issue in 2016 , and winning in significant part because of the votes he got in that Rust Belt ground zero territory of the industrial collapse, signaled the end of whatever appearance of credibility the dismissals of deindustrialization had ever had--not that everyone admitted it, of course. Rather the house pseudo-intellectuals of the hooked-on-neoliberalism Democratic Party spun tales about having actually been defeated on the terrain of "culture," not the economy. And a decade on they are still at it, as their lie (not "falsehood," lie) that a cohort of young men brainwashed into reactionary views by "manosphere" figures like Jake Paul and Logan Paul and Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate by themselves put Trump into office. (I say again, lie: as the Validated Voter Tables show, males 18-29 voted for Harris against Trump by a margin of 51-46 percent, as you can see for yourself on line 171 of the Pew Center's Excel document.)

The result is that the old rhetoric about deindustrialization's supposed nonexistence is dead. However, that is not the case with the pattern of the rhetoric that was used to delay recognition of the issue--namely that the champions of orthodoxy told us that "it" wasn't happening, or that if "it" was happening it didn't matter, or that "it" was happening and did matter but doing something about it would be worse than doing nothing 'cuz Markets give us optimal outcomes and any refusal to kneel before the Great God Market will mean suffering His Wrath. Indeed very often the same "Good School"-graduated Establishment "expert" would throw all of these totally inconsistent claims in our faces at once--because just as the facts didn't matter consistency didn't either, the only thing they had to stick to, the only thing about which they cared to be consistent, that government cannot, must not, do anything that Big Business and its beneficiaries would find at all bothersome, like implement an industrial policy that would get in the way of the super-financialization that had Wall Street partying like it was (pre-crash) 1929. Not so much a matter of arguing for a position as distracting, confusing, overwhelming the listener or reader and viewer as a substitute for argument because genuinely persuasive argument based on the facts is impossible, those well-acquainted with that issue will likely have found this familiar. Certainly they may recognize it from how the same sorts who denied that deindustrialization was happening, or at least that anything ought to be done about it, now engage in "climate inactivism," telling us "It's not happening," and "Okay it's happening but it's trivial" and "Okay it's happening and it's not trivial but we shouldn't do anything 'cuz Markets" in the same cynical breath. The tactic shouldn't work, but it has had its undeniable successes, mainly because it has such powerful interests behind it, though both memory and critical thought being in short supply makes the work of the manipulators much easier than it otherwise would be.