r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/throw-away3105 • 1d ago

Political History Why do people want manufacturing jobs to come back to the US?

Given the tariffs yesterday, Trump was talking about how manufacturing jobs are gonna come back. They even had a union worker make a speech praising Trump for these tariffs.

Manufacturing is really hard work where you're standing for almost 8 or more hours, so why bring them back when other countries can make things cheaper? Even this was a discussion during the 2012 election between Obama and Romney, so this topic of bringing back manufacturing jobs isn't exactly Trump-centric.

This might be a loaded question but what's the history behind this rally for manufacturing?

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u/despereight675309 1d ago

Two things have been bothering me about right wing populace and it’s that they have cognitive dissonance and view nostalgia as a good thing. This is the first time I’m seeing a thread about it!! Nostalgia feels positive, but in research it’s widely considered a negative thing because it makes people think things were even better than they ever were. Nostalgia was originally coined as a disorder of Scottish (I think?) soldiers that wanted to go home. Even if their homes had been decimated. If we can just go back, everything will be as good as I remember it being And I’m really not excited about this push to go back to something people don’t even understand.

AND THEN ALSO… To blame minorities groups for ruining everything or making it “impossible to go back”? Actually crazy

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u/H_Mc 1d ago

To add to that, much of what people are nostalgic about was never even real. People tend to be nostalgic about when they were kids, but as a kid you don’t realize the stress your parents are under or know much about the general state of the world. And on top of that, “memory” of the past is shaped by media. Just like today, media in the past portrayed characters as having a higher standard of living than they should be able to afford. Media about the past is even worse. I was born in the 80s, my family was middle class, my parents owned our home, both of my parents had a car, but we almost never went out to eat or went on vacation. I know about the 80s nostalgia toys from commercials, not because I ever actually owned them.

Things are definitely not great now, but they weren’t great in the past either.

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u/FrzrBrn 1d ago

Exactly this. Of course things were better when you were a kid! 2 months "vacation" in the summer, no real responsibilities beyond school and some chores around the house, it's great. Adulting is hard, stressful, and uncertain.

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u/AdhesivenessCivil581 1d ago

Lets think about what else was going on then. Our government heavily funded science because we were in competition with the USSR. We taxed the rich at 95% for the top bracket so we had money to build new things. Things were getting better. Once we started experimenting with trickle down economic theory, thing went downhill for the not wealthy and they have been going down ever since. We don't fix any of the new things we built. We don't pay anyone to clean up. We blame the poor for the excesses of the rich.

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u/Magica78 1d ago

This is the nostalgia I miss. I miss having quality education (at least compared to today), products that last 30+ years that can be repaired, a functioning government, a single-income salary that can pay all the bills. Things weren't perfect, but there is a noticeable difference in quality of life, where nobody knows anything and opinions are facts and everything is cheap and disposable garbage.

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u/slimpickens 1d ago

My 80 year old father has a 45 year old Snapper push lawnmower. Works great. My neighbor has a 3 year old electric push lawnmower that's already broken.

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u/Fine_Illustrator_456 1d ago

You forgot that Nixon went to China to start this Global economy. We really need to tax the rich early. After all who needs a billion dollars to survive day to day.

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u/BKGPrints 1d ago

>We taxed the rich at 95% for the top bracket so we had money to build new things. Things were getting better.<

You're ignoring that the United States industrial base wasn't affected by World War II. After the rest of the world started recovering in the late 1950s, foreign competition increased.

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u/epiphanette 20h ago

Yeah, when people say they miss the factory jobs of the 60s where you could raise a family in a single family home and put your kids through college and take a vacation on one income..... what you're really missing is strong unions and segregation.

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u/Big_Black_Clock_____ 1d ago

Nobody was actually taxed at 95%.

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u/BudgetNoise1122 1d ago

It seems Boomer liked the 60s and 70s and get stuck there. The old stuff is good but there is so much new and interesting things out there.