Trump's Utopia: He's borne back ceaselessly into a fictitious past reshaped for his immediate needs.

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-05-07-trumps-utopia/



America has seldom had a president as enamored of the nation’s storied past as Donald Trump is, and never had a president as starkly ignorant of its actual past as Trump is, either. Reopening Alcatraz. Making coal mining great again. Resurrecting our role as a colonial power, so that the only cross-border products we need come from lands we control. And reconstructing the world-class economy we enjoyed when our tariffs were highest, in the 1890s. Where to begin? Doesn’t Trump realize how much coal miners hated their jobs, how unsafe and often deadly their work was, how often they went on strike, how violent their interactions with the mine owners were?

Near the end of his nearly 40-year tenure as president of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis was asked about his program to mechanize many mining functions, even if that cost some members their jobs. “It will be a millennium,” Lewis answered, “if men do not have to work underground, but can all work in God’s sunshine.” What was good about mining, and manufacturing more generally, was never the work itself; it was only the pay and benefits that unions won for their members between the 1930s and the 1970s, after which their compensation largely stagnated and their numbers declined.

Trump envisions an America actually pining for that kind of work, even as he appoints officials at the Labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board devoted to weakening what’s left of the labor movement, even as factories are now so mechanized that they employ a small fraction of the workers they once employed. So even the kind of economic autarky that Trump envisions wouldn’t bring back the manufacturing jobs by the millions he assumes it will, and won’t bring back good jobs at all in the deunionized America whose contours his acolytes shape. Then there’s his broader equation of tariffs with economic prosperity, for which he adduces as proof the Gilded Age. “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” Trump said a few days after his second term began. “That’s when we were a tariff country.” That depends, of course, on who Trump means by “we.”

It’s true that it was in those years that the railroad, oil, steel, and banking industries were consolidated by a handful of moguls—Gould, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan—whose towering share of the entire nation’s economy was unrivaled until the coming of the current generation of tech oligarchs. Both groups were singularly focused on amassing personal wealth, through worker suppression, monopoly control of markets, and tax avoidance. Trump puts the apex of Gilded Age prosperity in the 1890s, as that was the decade of our highest-ever tariffs. But the 1890s were also the decade of the deepest depression in our history, save only that of the 1930s. And in the 1890s, no New Deal legislation came along to provide work and sustenance to a heavily unemployed working class. For which reason, the 1890s saw more deaths from poverty than any decade in American history.

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[Blue Owl]

1. He's barely a functioning moron