Beyond Tariffs: What Neoliberals Get Wrong About American Manufacturing

Trump’s tariffs lack strategy, fueling inflation without solutions. Neoliberal Democrats dismiss manufacturing jobs as unattainable and unneeded.

There’s a certain kind of elite liberal who really believes the grocery store makes food.

You’ve probably met them. They’ll say we don’t need to make anything here anymore because we’re rich and we can just pay other countries to do it. Like the dollar is some magic token that guarantees someone somewhere will always make our stuff, ship it to us, and thank us for the privilege and the greenback.

It’s the same thinking as someone who eats meat but doesn’t want to see a bone—doesn’t want to be reminded that it came from an animal. Doesn’t want to know the messy, real process that brings that meat to the table. That kind of person wants everything polished, shrink-wrapped, and abstracted from reality.

And that’s exactly how we treat the economy now. We think food comes from the grocery store, electricity comes from the wall, and medicine comes from CVS. We’ve become a country so detached from the systems that keep us alive that we think GDP growth and financialization are the same thing as wealth. They are not wealth.

Real wealth is the ability to build, grow, refine, produce. It’s the ability to create the things you need—and the things the world wants—from raw materials and labor. It’s energy, housing, medicine, machines, and food. If you can’t do those things, you’re not wealthy. You’re dependent. You’re fragile. And eventually, you’re irrelevant.

What Do We Actually Still Make? Not Much.

Now you’ll get some neoliberal pundits, Ezra Klein types, who say: “Actually, the U.S. still makes more than ever!” But you dig into it and see what we’re really making, and it’s mostly chemicals, refined oil, some semiconductors, and processed food. That’s the bulk of it.

You wanna know what we don’t make? Damn near everything else.

The machines we use to drill oil—we don’t make most of those. The parts for our power grid? Imported. The chips for our computers and weapons? Mostly made in Asia. The precursors for pharmaceuticals? China and India. We couldn’t rebuild our grid, restock our hospitals, or sustain our own military if the rest of the world stopped answering the phone.

Even in industries where we still technically “manufacture,” most of the value is added overseas. We import the guts of the machine, bolt the shell together here, and call it “Made in America.” It’s manufacturing role-playing.

We’ve become addicted to a version of “manufacturing” that’s mostly branding, packaging, and accounting tricks. But somehow, we think we’re still indispensable to the rest of the world. It’s wild and it’s how nations fail.

The System Didn’t Fail—It Was Built This Way

Let’s be clear: this didn’t just happen. This wasn’t some accident of global markets or natural evolution. This was the result of choices—decades of deliberate policy decisions. It wasn’t a failure. It was a design.

The hollowing out started long before NAFTA. Nixon cracked the door open. Carter nudged it further. Reagan blew it off the hinges. But NAFTA—that was the moment the Democratic Party didn’t just go along with the destruction—they championed it. That’s why it hurt so bad. Not just because of the jobs it destroyed, but because of who did it.

It wasn’t Reagan. It wasn’t Bush. It was Bill Clinton.

The supposed defender of working people handed corporate America a knife, pointed it at the heart of industrial America, and told the rest of us, “You’ll be fine.”

NAFTA didn’t just shift jobs to Mexico—it detonated regional economies. China’s entry into the WTO didn’t just “open up trade”—it obliterated entire sectors and made us dependent on a geopolitical rival for the goods that keep modern life running. And all of it was sold to us by the same people who spent 40 years preaching the gospel of global capital: Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, the Chicago School crew, and the bipartisan elite that followed them—Clinton, Obama, Biden.

They bought into the fantasy of a “managerial economy,” where America would design, brand, and consult, and the rest of the world would do the building. But you can’t eat consulting. You can’t power a grid with branding.

We weren’t screwed by China or Mexico. We were screwed by our own people.

We were sold out by our business leaders, our think tanks, our economists, our politicians and our chambers of commerce—by people who thought working with your hands was beneath them, who thought industry was outdated, who assumed the rest of the world would never catch up. And when they gutted our communities, they had the balls to tell working people we were “nostalgic”—like wanting a solid union job with benefits was some kind of personal weakness.

Since 1975, the top 10% in this country have siphoned off $79 trillion in productivity and value from the bottom 90%. That’s not “market efficiency.” That’s theft. That’s hundreds of millions of Americans doing the work and getting none of the reward. It’s generational robbery—and we’re still living in the wreckage.

And this isn’t just an American problem—it’s global. The Western elite aligned itself with a system that rewards extraction over production, finance over labor, consulting over building. Across the world, the people doing the work are getting squeezed while the people doing the skimming get rich.

It didn’t fail. It worked—just not for three hundred million or so of us.

Trump Saw the Fire and Grabbed a Can of Gas

Now, here comes Trump. And he says, “You’ve been screwed. They’ve been laughing at us. China’s winning. America doesn’t make anything anymore.” And the thing is—he’s not wrong about the diagnosis.

But his solutions? It's dumb as hell.

A bunch of random ass tariffs on everything with zero plan to rebuild industrial capacity? That’s just setting the house on fire and calling it a renovation.

This is a guy who wants you to believe America has been helpless and innocent, a big victim getting taken advantage of by mean foreigners. Bullshit. The American people have been taken advantage of, yes—but not by China not by immigrants. By the Chamber of Commerce and CEOs. By our own institutions. By our own leadership.

Trump isn’t offering a fix. He’s offering a tantrum. He slapped tariffs on China in 2018 and the trade deficit still hit record highs. Because you can’t just tax your way into a manufacturing renaissance. You have to build. And that takes vision, capital, training, infrastructure, and coordination.

Tariffs without rebuilding are just a tax by another name.

The Dollar’s Only Good As Long As We Are

The only reason this house of cards hasn’t collapsed yet is because the dollar is still the world’s reserve currency. That means we can print money, run deficits, and import everything we consume—and the world keeps accepting our IOUs.

But that’s not eternal. Countries are already moving off the dollar. BRICS is doing trade in yuan. Nations are settling oil in other currencies. The dollar’s share of global reserves has been sliding for 20 years.

Why? Because we’ve stopped being useful. We don’t make the stuff. We don’t supply the tools. We don’t offer the capacity. All we offer is market access, military muscle, and financial systems.

When that’s all you’ve got, and someone else shows up with something real—the world moves on.

If We Want to Matter, We Have to Be Useful Again

We need to return to being useful. Not just to ourselves, but to the world.

Useful doesn’t mean sending troops or supporting genocide. It doesn’t mean floating debt. It means building systems, producing goods, solving real problems. It means becoming a country that makes the machines that run the world again.

If you can’t make your own power grid components, you’re not sovereign. If you can’t produce your own pharmaceuticals, you’re not safe. If your food comes from global supply chains and your military depends on rare earths from a rival, you’re not strong.

Manufacturing is not nostalgia. It’s power. It’s independence. It’s leverage. And it’s how you build a future that’s not built on hope and spreadsheets.

This Is a National Project

There’s a growing movement of people who get this. Who know that food doesn’t come from the grocery store, and that power doesn’t come from flipping a switch. That copper matters. That machine tools matter. That the ability to fabricate, refine, and assemble things on your own soil is what makes a country independent.

For too long, our greatest export has been force. We’ve been the Western world’s bouncer—showing up with aircraft carriers to defend capital, not democracy. But what if we became the builder again? What if the world respected us not because of our weapons, but because we made the tools that powered progress?

That’s the opportunity. That’s the mission.

We’re not out of time. But the clock is ticking. And if we don’t wake up to how fragile this whole arrangement is, we’re going to find ourselves holding a lot of paper wealth in a world that doesn’t care.

It’s time to compete. Time to build. Time to matter again.

And it’s going to take people in power who actually understand this—who know we need to build, not brand. Who aren’t defending the system that got us here but are ready to tear it out at the root and replace it with something that works.

That’s why I want you to check out Saikat Chakrabarti. He’s a friend of mine. Co-founded Justice Democrats. Helped build the Green New Deal. And now he’s running against Nancy Pelosi. Not because one seat changes everything—but because the ideas he’s pushing can.

He’s not just talking about decline—he’s offering a blueprint to fix it and asking candidates to join him. He gets what this post is about. He’s leading the fight to build something new.

Check it out here.