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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsEconomic Nationalism and the Half-Life of Deindustrialization
Interesting...
In our 2002 book Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown, we wrote that Youngstowns story was Americas story. That seems even more true today, as Americans struggle to adapt to the growing precarity of work and to a changed political landscape. As Youngstown marks the 40th anniversary of its first major mill closing, people here understand that deindustrialization did not end in 1977, or even in 1982, when Youngstown Sheet and Tube closed the last of its local mills. They know that deindustrialization has a half-life. Like toxic waste, its potency decreases slowly, and it continues to cause harm to individuals, to communities, and, as Americans increasingly recognize, to the nation as a whole.
Yet it is also worth remembering this: the first response to Black Monday in 1977 was not despair or resentment. It was activism. Busloads of local residents went to Washington to demand assistance from the government. Churches, civic groups, banks, and unions worked together to devise a plan for the community to buy and manage the mills. That part of local memory has faded, but the populism it reflected has returned.
Like the economic changes since the late 1970s, the politics of resentment will not disappear any time soon. New technologies and artificial intelligence will likely displace even more Americans, and workers no longer buy old promises about creative destruction or the great potential of a knowledge economy. The memory of an era when working-class jobs were good jobs has not yet faded, but neither has the hope that new policies will bring back good jobs. In the half-life of deindustrialization, Bannon may be right that traditional party affiliations will give way to a political contest between right-wing and left-wing populist movements, each promising as so many politicians have before to create real change for working people.
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2017/10/30/economic-nationalism-and-the-half-life-of-deindustrialization/
irisblue
(32,973 posts)Garrett78
(10,721 posts)Jobs that have left are not coming back. For instance, coal is not, nor should it, come back. If populism is "support for the concerns of ordinary people" (the first definition I see upon Googling the term), then Trumpian populism is nothing more than "support for the bigotries of white folks." Because he sure as hell isn't, nor was he ever going to, offer support in terms of closing the wage gap, labor union advocacy, combating climate change (or even acknowledge it), pushing for a universal basic income in the face of unstoppable automation and globalization, combating institutional racism and sexism, reparations, criminal justice reform such as ending the so-called "War on Drugs," etc., etc., etc.
Just because the lazy and pitiful media and Trump's campaign (and maybe Trump himself, though I don't recall) used the term "populist" to describe that narcissistic bigot, that doesn't make it so.