2025-04-04 06:15:00
In February, a group of men on a sports talk show casually spread a salacious and untrue rumor about the sex life of a teenage girl on national television, resulting in her being humiliated and relentlessly harassed. It felt as though it were 2007 again, and the talk show banter was a brief pause before our nation’s busy schedule of making fun of Britney Spears’s breakdown.
On ESPN’s bro-y The Pat McAfee Show, the titular McAfee introduced a segment on NFL draft picks by gossiping about an undergraduate rumor he’d heard: that a sorority girl at the University of Mississippi had cheated on her fraternity boyfriend with his father. McAfee didn’t mention the young woman or her boyfriend by name, but later shared the clip on X to his 3.2 million followers (the post is still up, as of April 3). Barstool Sports personality Jack Mac then promoted a meme coin named after the girl in question: Mary Kate Cornett, a first-year college student. Cornett denies the rumor, but that hasn’t stopped it from spreading like wildfire.
As reported on the New York Times’ The Athletic, as the rumor spread, the harassment Cornett experienced ratcheted up. She had to leave her college dorm and move into emergency housing after campus police said she was at risk. Someone sent in a false tip to the police to have a SWAT team sent to her mother’s home. Cornett’s voicemail and text message filled up with degrading messages from strangers calling her a whore and telling her to kill herself; similar messages have also reached her 89-year-old grandfather. Cornett now says she intends to pursue legal action against McAfee and ESPN. ESPN and McAfee have declined to comment to The Athletic and other news outlets.
There’s something so 2000s about this story — the kind of thing you would read about on a feminist blog at the time. It has all the beats of a classic aughts slut-shaming: an anonymous teenage girl, the men on a talk show using her humiliation as idle chit-chat, the way that chit-chat picks up and runs rampant until the girl is getting anonymous threats from strangers. It’s very Swiffer Girl, in which a graphic tape an eighth-grader made for the boy she had a crush on went viral. It’s very Vanessa Hudgens in 2007, when she was forced to apologize to fans and scramble to save her Disney career when private nude photos of her were leaked. It’s basically all the episodes that the talk show hosts of the 2000s have by now apologized for. The only part that’s really new is the memecoin and the right-wing ecosystem of X that allows such gossip to flourish.
Surely, a person might think, we have moved past this kind of national slut-shaming by now. We live in a post-MeToo world. The culture must have moved past the sexual humiliation of teen girls.
Yet in a way, the Ole Miss story is the kind of thing that’s been a long time coming. The right has been interested in reviving Bush-era raunch (think Girls Gone Wild) and purity culture (think: the obsession with Britney Spears’s virginity) for years now. Purity culture and raunch culture walk hand in hand. The sexual objectification of raunch is enforced by the rigid shaming of purity. Both are united by the compulsory objectification and humiliation of women, whose bodies within this system are always controlled by men.
As sociologist Bernadette Barton showed in her 2021 book The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society, raunch has become fundamental to the self-conception of the post-Trump right. Barton notes the number of pro-Trump memes that “explicitly link provocative female bodies with Trump paraphernalia,” or that “contrast ‘sexy’ conservative women with ‘ugly, unfeminine’ liberal ones.”
“No longer are misogynists confined to the old dichotomy framing women as virgins or whores,” Barton observes. “Raunch culture has facilitated a new sexist dichotomy: hot or not.”
The ideology claims all hot girls as their own and demands that they place themselves at the service of men, for their amusement. Taking on this position allows a woman a certain amount of cultural currency, which is why the right likes to crow that hot girls vote for Trump and only ugly girls are liberal. Yet being a hot girl also opens her up to the possibility of the kind of vicious, highly sexualized humiliation and harassment that Cornett is facing. That is the ideology that allowed the right to claim an apolitical figure like Hawk Tuah Girl as a MAGA symbol, and at the same time to smear Kamala Harris as “the original Hawk Tuah Girl.”
The point of it is to degrade, to dominate, to make it clear that sex exists to gratify men. Humiliating an anonymous teenager for fun is the natural endpoint of this ideology. It was always what was lurking under the hot girls for Trump jokes.
2025-04-04 04:15:00
The Trump administration’s tariffs are, by every reasonable account, an economic catastrophe in the making. So why are they happening?
One explanation is that this is simply democracy at work. President Donald Trump campaigned on doing more or less exactly what he’s just done, and the voting public elected him. So here we are.
That’s at best a partial story. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to see Trump’s tariffs as a symptom of democratic decay — of America transitioning into a kind of strange hybrid system that combines both authoritarian and democratic features.
Were America’s democracy functioning properly, Trump wouldn’t have the power to impose such broad tariffs unilaterally. Congress, not the presidency, has the constitutional authority to raise taxes — and tariffs are, of course, a tax on imports.
Yet the basic design of the American system has broken down, allowing the president to usurp far more authority than is healthy. In many policy areas, the presidency functions less like a democratic chief executive who operates under constraint and more like an elected dictatorship.
And historically, dictatorships — elected or otherwise — suffer from a fatal flaw: they have no ability to stop the people at the top from acting on their policy whims and, in the process, producing national disasters. This tendency is why democracy tends to produce superior policy outcomes over the long run; why America, and not Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, won the 20th century.
The tariffs, in short, show the true stakes of democratic decline. It’s not just a matter of abstract principle, but the difference between stability and disaster.
When Donald Trump and Elon Musk began laying waste to the federal government in February, the political scientist Adam Przeworski declared himself “at a loss.” Though Przeworski is one of the world’s most eminent scholars of comparative democracy, author of many defining pieces in the field, he could not find the right vocabulary to describe what was happening in the United States.
Though “Trump was elected in fair elections,” his subsequent policy agenda amounted to “revolutionary change of the relation between the state and society” — one that attempts to replace the rules and norms that define democratic politics with something very different.
Understanding America in this more textured sense, as a country under a new and confusing regime that is both democratic and not, helps us make better sense out of the Trump tariff debacle.
On the one hand, an electorate that picked Trump is getting one of Trump’s signature policies. Sometimes, in democracies, demagogues win elections — a problem so old that you can find a discussion of it in Plato’s Republic.
On the other hand, democracies rely on legal rules constraining the executive to prevent any such demagogue from becoming a dictator. In the American system, that means a complex system of constitutional checks and balances — one of which is the Constitution granting taxation powers to Congress and Congress alone. Yet instead of asking for statutory authorization to raise tariffs, Trump is exploiting broadly worded emergency legislation to do an end-run around the legislative branch.
This is what a hybrid political system looks like in practice. The United States still has free and fair elections at all levels of government, and is in that sense democratic. But elections don’t matter in the way that they’re supposed to, because the people’s representatives in Congress are not playing their constitutionally assigned policymaking role. This is the autocratic component of the current American system, one that enables the president to sabotage the global economy if he so wishes.
The transformation of America, from democracy to Frankensteinian amalgam, has been in the works for decades.
The primary culprit is Congress, which has — due to a combination of partisanship and political cowardice — become both unable and unwilling to act as the supreme lawmaking body. Instead, it began delegating significant amounts of its own authority to the executive.
Sometimes, this was intentional — authorizing the president to make policy through executive agencies, creating the “administrative state” conservatives decry. Sometimes, it was unintentional: Congress giving the president vague emergency powers that were supposed to function in narrow circumstances, but in practice allowed the president to act unilaterally in all sorts of “normal” policy debates. And sometimes, Congress simply did nothing on crucial policy issues — forcing the president to try to address them with dubiously broad interpretations of their own powers.
The judicial branch deserves some blame too. While the Supreme Court has occasionally stepped in to address presidential overreach, it has done so in a haphazard and partisan way. Moreover, it has long deferred to the president on key issues like immigration, trade, and war.
Observers on both the liberal left and the libertarian right warned for decades that growing executive power posed a problem for democracy and good policymaking. Obviously, they were right to do so in hindsight. Yet part of the reason that they were ignored is that there were other checks on the president that seemed to keep the executive in line.
Some of these were internal executive branch checks. The White House relied on the Office of Legal Counsel — a group of senior executive branch attorneys — to provide independent opinions on the legality of various policy options. Internal policy shops like the Council of Economic Advisers provided informed expert opinions that would steer presidents toward more evidence-based policymaking. In dire cases, the Justice Department would probe potentially criminal activity by executive branch staff.
Other checks were more informal. Fear of losing the war for public opinion might prevent a president from taking a particularly radical stance. The president’s own moral code, a sense that there are just certain things one shouldn’t do even if you can, also provided a kind of soft check on the abuse of power.
But what’s clear now is that all of these internal mechanisms were voluntary. Trump has neutered executive branch checks on his authority and (clearly!) does not possess the judgment we expect from people in the highest office.
It turns out that the rest of the political system — and especially Congress — had created the conditions for our descent into a hybrid political system. The only barriers remaining were norms about how the executive branch should work, ones that a determined president like Trump could smash through with ease.
Sometimes, the stakes in this kind of conversation can feel a little fuzzy. Why does it matter if we are living in a hybrid system rather than a full democracy? Sure, the president may be powerful, but if we’ve still got elections, then isn’t everything going to be fine in the end?
The tariffs provide one of the clearest examples of why this matters for everyone: without democracy, the quality of our policymaking gets dangerously worse.
Political scientists have long found that, on average, democracies produce better outcomes for citizens than authoritarian states. They produce higher rates of economic growth, superior technological innovation, better public health services, and are even more likely to win wars.
One of the key reasons for democracy’s success has been its formalized policymaking process. Because laws are changed through legal and transparent processes, ones subject to public debate and legal oversight, they are more likely to both be well-informed by the best available evidence and corrected if something goes badly.
Authoritarian and hybrid regimes ditch these constraints, which allows them to make policy changes a lot faster. But it also enables one person, or a small group of people, to make radical decisions on a whim with disastrous consequences.
Think about Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China, a direct product of the leader’s adherence to a Communist ideology that was out of touch with reality. While Trump’s tariffs are nowhere near as evil — the Great Leap Forward killed somewhere between 18 and 32 million people — the same formal problem contributed to both mistakes.
For a more recent example, look at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The disaster began with Putin’s personal obsession with the idea that Ukrainian nationhood was fake and that the territory was rightfully Russian. This notion went from Putin’s personal obsession to actual war because no one could stop him.
Trump’s tariffs will, if fully implemented, be remembered as their own cautionary tale. While he campaigned on them, he wouldn’t have been able to implement the entire tariff package had he gone through the normal constitutionally prescribed procedure for raising taxes. The fact that America isn’t functioning like a normal democracy, with public deliberation and multiple checks on executive authority, is what allowed Trump to act on his idiosyncratic ideas in the manner of a Mao or Putin.
Now, it’s still possible that Trump steps back from the brink. But even if he does, and the worst outcome is avoided, the lesson should be clear: the long decay of America’s democratic system means that we are all living under an axe.
And if this isn’t the moment it falls, there will surely be another.
2025-04-04 03:40:00
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs on pretty much everything imported into the United States. Among other things, the tariffs include a 10 percent minimum tax of imports outside of North America, a hodgepodge of different tax rates on Canadian and Mexican goods, a 25 percent tax on cars manufactured outside the US, and a chaotic mix of country-specific tariffs ranging from 10 to 50 percent.
Trump’s tariffs are likely to deal a significant self-inflicted blow to the US economy. As of this writing, the S&P 500 — a common index used to track US stock prices — is down about 4 percent. The Budget Lab at Yale predicts that the tariffs will cause enough inflation to effectively reduce the average US household’s annual income by $3,789 in 2024 dollars. A similar analysis by Auckland University of Technology economics professor Niven Winchester predicts a $3,487 blow to US households.
Thus far, Trump’s second presidential term has been a series of staring contests between Trump and the courts. Trump’s tariffs could lead to yet another, though the answer to the question of whether a lawsuit challenging them might succeed is quite unclear. And not just because the Supreme Court has shown great solicitude for Trump in recent years. The federal laws governing tariffs give the president very broad authority over trade policy generally, and specifically over tariff rates. A court concerned solely with following the text of federal law is likely to uphold Trump’s tariffs.
But the current Supreme Court is not such a court. During the Biden administration, the Court’s Republican majority frequently used a novel legal doctrine known as “major questions” to strike down executive branch actions they deemed too ambitious. Under the doctrine, the courts are supposed to cast a particularly skeptical eye on executive branch actions “of vast ‘economic and political significance” — like, say, a new tax policy that is likely to cost the average American household thousands of dollars a year.
The major questions doctrine cannot be found somewhere in the Constitution or a federal statute. It is fairly new, the Court has never explained where it comes from, and it appears to be entirely made up by the Republican justices. So it is difficult to predict whether those justices will apply it to a Republican president, or whether they will deem Trump’s tariffs a violation of this entirely arbitrary doctrine.
Still, the argument that Trump’s tariffs violate the major questions doctrine is sufficiently straightforward that it would be easy for a judge to write an opinion reaching this conclusion.
It might seem that Republican judges, especially those appointed by Trump, would hesitate to apply the doctrine in a manner that would harm him. Judicial politics, however, do not always align perfectly with the behavior of elected officials.
Federal judges serve for life, so they do not need to fear electoral retaliation if they break with a president of the same party. And justices sometimes have ideological commitments that trump their loyalty to whatever transient agenda their party’s political leaders are pushing at any given moment. The major questions doctrine centralizes power in the judiciary, something that members of the judiciary may find attractive. And a decision applying this doctrine to a Republican president would help legitimize it, as it has previously only been used against Biden.
There is a very real chance, in other words, that five justices would place their commitment to judicial supervision of the executive above their commitment to Trump — striking down his tariffs in the process.
In his executive order announcing the latest round of tariffs, Trump claims the power to do so under a wide range of federal laws, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the Trade Act of 1974. Though these laws do impose some constraints on Trump and his subordinates, those constraints are largely procedural and impose few substantive limits on the scope and size of tariffs.
Under one provision of the Trade Act, for example, the US Trade Representative, a Cabinet-level position currently held by Jamieson Greer, must make certain findings — such as a determination that a foreign country’s conduct “is unjustifiable and burdens or restricts United States commerce,” or that this country’s actions are “unreasonable or discriminatory and burdens or restricts United States commerce” — before the United States may impose new tariffs under this act.
Once Greer does so, however, executive power to tax imports is quite broad. The government may “impose duties or other import restrictions on the goods of, and, notwithstanding any other provision of law, fees or restrictions on the services of, such foreign country for such time as the trade representative determines appropriate.”
Trump’s latest executive order, meanwhile, appears to rely heavily on his power to regulate trade after declaring a national emergency — the order makes such a declaration in response to what he labels “the domestic economic policies of key trading partners and structural imbalances in the global trading system.”
Notably, this law only permits the president to declare such an emergency “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States,” but the law does not define terms like “national emergency” or “usual and extraordinary threat.”
Once a declaration of emergency is in place, the president’s powers are quite broad under the statute. Trump may regulate “any property in which any foreign country or any national thereof has or has had any interest.”
Though the text of the laws governing presidential authority over tariffs give Trump and his administration a great deal of authority, so did another law known as the Heroes Act. That law gives the education secretary sweeping power to “waive or modify” student loan obligations “as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency” such as the Covid pandemic.
But the Court’s Republican majority paid no heed to this broad statutory language in Biden v. Nebraska (2023), which struck down a Biden administration program that would have forgiven $10,000 worth of student loans for most borrowers.
Nebraska relied, at least in part, on the major questions doctrine, claiming that the student loan forgiveness program was illegal because it was simply too big. “The ‘economic and political significance’ of the Secretary’s action is staggering by any measure,” the six Republican justices claimed in that opinion, pointing to a University of Pennsylvania analysis that concluded that the student loan forgiveness program would cost “between $469 billion and $519 billion.”
Trump’s tariffs, meanwhile, involve similarly eye-popping numbers. According to the Census Bureau, there are about 127 million households in the United States. If Yale’s Budget Lab is correct that the average household will lose $3,789 in real annual income because of Trump’s tariffs, that means that American consumers face a staggering loss of more than $480 billion in real income.
In fairness, Nebraska also pointed to what it called the “unprecedented nature of the Secretary’s debt cancellation plan” to justify its conclusion, and Trump may be able to point to a precedent for the kind of sweeping tariffs he recently announced. In 1971, President Richard Nixon briefly imposed a 10 percent tariff on nearly all foreign goods, and a federal appeals court upheld this tariff. Notably, however, Congress has since amended some of the laws that Nixon relied upon more than half a century ago.
Additionally, there appears to be a bit of a debate over whether the major questions doctrine applies to laws that delegate power directly to the president — as opposed to a statute like the Heroes Act, which empowers a cabinet secretary or other agency-level official.
In Nebraska v. Su (2024), for example, the Biden administration argued that this doctrine does not apply to the president. Though the federal appeals court which heard this case did not reach this question, Trump-appointed Judge Ryan Nelson argued that it does — in part because the separation of powers concerns that animated decisions like Nebraska apply equally regardless of whether executive power is exercised by the president or one of his subordinates.
It’s impossible to guess whether the current slate of justices will rule that the Nixon precedent justifies setting aside the major questions doctrine, or whether they will conclude that this doctrine does not apply to Trump. Again, this doctrine is brand new, is not grounded in any constitutional or statutory text, and appears to be entirely made up by the Court’s Republican majority. So asking whether this fabricated doctrine applies to the president is a bit like asking your daughter if her imaginary friend likes to dance. The answer is whatever she wants it to be.
Still, the case for applying the major questions doctrine to Trump’s tariff is at least as strong as the argument for applying it to Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. And, while this Court has been extraordinarily protective of Trump in the past, there are cynical partisan reasons why its Republican majority may want to apply the major questions doctrine to Trump in this case — Republicans would likely get crushed in the next election if Trump tanks the economy with his tariffs.
2025-04-04 03:36:29
President Donald Trump’s defenders often frame his trade policies as prioritizing economic development over the free market.
In their telling, America has an interest in manufacturing valuable goods domestically, even if producing such wares in the US is not maximally profitable right now. Our nation might not currently make semiconductors as well as Taiwan or electric vehicles as well as China. But if we protect our nascent chip and EV industries, they might eventually become globally competitive. And that could make America wealthier, as the international market for such technologies will be large and opportunities for productivity gains in those industries are significant.
This is a reasonable argument for the utility of tariffs in some contexts. But it doesn’t amount to a case for Donald Trump’s tariffs.
On Wednesday, Trump announced that he will impose a 10 percent minimum tariff on all foreign imports, and much stiffer rates on most nations: 20 percent for goods made in the European Union, 46 percent for Vietnam, and 54 percent for China. In a sign of the policy’s intellectual caliber, the president also ordered a 10 percent tariff on all exports from two uninhabited Antarctic islands (perhaps on the assumption that penguins will soon develop opposable thumbs thumbs and heavy industry).
Traditionally, countries use tariffs and industrial policy to climb the international “value chain” — to go from producing simple goods (like T-shirts) or basic commodities (like lumber) to making complex products that are more valuable.
But Trump’s trade policies would move the United States down the value chain. His tariffs are not designed to foster domestic production of a few highly valuable, cutting-edge products. Rather, he aims to move more or less all forms of manufacturing to the United States. His tariffs apply to all imported goods, from kitchen mitts to airplanes.
As Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal notes, this would likely make the United States less competitive in the world’s most lucrative markets. If America lets poorer countries supply it with T-shirts and aluminum, it can dedicate more of its resources to producing semiconductors, airplanes, chemicals, medical equipment, software, and artificial intelligence.
The more capital and labor we must devote to providing ourselves with socks and aprons, the less we’ll have to expend on more fruitful enterprises.
Trump’s tariffs aren’t rooted in rational development aims. The president is not trying to dominate the industries of the future — he’s trying to bring back the economy of the past. Nostalgia is the point.
America’s right-wing nationalists associate the manufacturing-heavy economy of the 1950s and 1960s with a favored set of social and material conditions. It was an era when rates of wage growth, marriage, and fertility were high, and regional inequality was low. And they believe that they can bend the arc of history back toward that golden age by dramatically increasing US manufacturing employment.
But this is a fantasy. America can only return to the mid-century industrial economy in the sense that it can return to subsistence farming: It is technically possible to embrace an anachronistic mode of production, but only at immense economic cost.
I don’t mean to assert that nostalgia is the driving force behind Trump’s trade agenda. Other motivations and intuitions are surely at play. For example, Trump seems to view trade as a zero-sum game, in which the loser is whichever country buys more goods than it sells.
Nevertheless, nostalgia for the postwar industrial economy suffuses the nationalist right’s rhetoric about trade policy, and informs its fixation on manufacturing employment.
In the “America first” movement’s narrative of national decline, deindustrialization — which is to say, the economy’s shift away from manufacturing and toward services — is synonymous with economic devastation and moral rot.
The basic story goes like this: In a bygone, golden era, American workers made things in factories, formed stable families, and coalesced into tight-knit communities. But then corrupt, globalist elites shipped US manufacturing jobs overseas, devastating middle-class workers in general — and male ones in particular. Marriage rates collapsed, communities frayed, and moral standards declined. By reshoring production, America’s former greatness can be restored.
As Trump explained in his first inaugural address, America’s fall from greatness began when “factories shuttered and left our shores” and the “wealth of our middle class” was “ripped from their homes,” leaving “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation” while “crime and gangs and drugs” festered in the ruins.
In his speech to Congress this year, the president gestured at similar themes, arguing that “tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs. They’re about protecting the soul of our country.”
For the Trumpist right, the US economy’s shift away from manufacturing and toward services not only had ruinous economic effects, but destabilizing social implications.
The industrial economy put a premium on brute strength, which men are far more likely to possess than women. The post-industrial economy, by contrast, features somewhat less demand for brawn, and considerable need for soft skills commonly associated with women. Deindustrialization was therefore a crisis for men in particular.
“Over the last 30 years and more, government policy has helped destroy the kind of economy that gave meaning to generations of men,” Republican Sen. Josh Hawley argued in a 2021 speech. “Domestic manufacturing once supported millions of American men with good wages, who in turn started and supported families. Now that industry lies all but dead on the altar of globalism.”
Some pro-Trump conservatives explicitly blame men’s declining economic advantage over women for falling marriage and birth rates. They argue that women tend to prefer singledom to partnering with a man who enjoys less economic status or earning potential than themselves. Therefore, to promote family formation, you need to improve men’s economic outcomes at women’s expense.
As one influential right-wing influencer mused on X, “you do not solve low birth rates by giving money to women, you solve low birth rates by taking money away from women.” National Review contributor Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry recently endorsed another X user’s sentiment that “fertility is a solved problem and tracks differential status between men and women.”
It is unclear whether Trump and his allies consciously see reindustrialization as a strategy for shifting gender relations in men’s favor. But the broad sense that the industrial economy was good for male workers specifically — and thus, for family formation — permeates the nationalist right’s rhetoric.
The right’s nostalgia for the industrial economy is understandable. From the end of World War II through the 1960s, more than one-quarter of US laborers worked in manufacturing (today, that figure is 9.7 percent). And those decades of high manufacturing employment witnessed exceptionally high rates of wage growth and economic mobility. Between 1948 and 1973, hourly compensation in the US climbed by 91.3 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Over the ensuing 50 years, by contrast, hourly wages grew by just 9.2 percent.
Meanwhile, a child born into the bottom half of America’s income distribution in 1940 had a 93 percent chance of outearning their parents, according to economist Raj Chetty’s research. A child born into similar circumstances in 1980, by contrast, had just a 45 percent chance of doing so.
What’s more, deindustrialization coincided with a profound shift in the relative economic power of men and women in the United States. Men bore the brunt of wage stagnation: From 1979 to 2019, the median male worker’s weekly earnings fell by roughly 3 percent, while the median female worker’s jumped by more than 30 percent.
The correlation between all these economic developments and the decline of manufacturing employment is not coincidental.
In the postwar period, manufacturing workers earned significantly more than similarly skilled laborers in other occupations, enjoying a 12 percent wage premium in 1983, according to the Cleveland Federal Reserve. Thus, as the manufacturing sector hemorrhaged jobs, millions of (disproportionately male) workers transitioned into less remunerative employment.
The manufacturing sector’s unusually high pay reflected two key characteristics of the industry. First, it is easier to achieve productivity gains in manufacturing than in many service-sector occupations. Increasing the number of widgets a factory worker can produce in an hour is a more straightforward engineering challenge than, say, increasing the number of children an individual daycare worker can nurture over the same period.
Second, the manufacturing sector was more heavily unionized than other parts of the economy. In 1980, 32.3 percent of manufacturing workers were organized, compared to 15 percent of all other private sector workers. The decline of manufacturing employment was therefore synonymous with the decline of unionization. And since unionized employers tend to pay higher wages than non-union ones, this likely contributed to wage stagnation.
To be clear, the decline of manufacturing was not the sole — or even primary — driver of slowing wage growth or rising income inequality in the US over the past half-century. Productivity and GDP growth rates slowed during the past 50 years, which limited opportunities for wage gains. Meanwhile, pay inequality within all sectors of the economy grew, as high-skilled workers across industries saw their advantage over less-educated workers swell. Nevertheless, the decline of manufacturing explains about a quarter of the jump in US income inequality between the 1980s and 2000s, according to a 2019 IMF working paper.
Deindustrialization also fed regional inequality, as localities that were economically dependent on manufacturing suffered wrenching economic decline while those dependent on the provision of high-end services such as finance or software development thrived. Some measures show a 40 percent increase in such inequality since 1980.
Finally, there is evidence that the decline of manufacturing did in fact lead to lower marriage and birth rates, as a result of men losing economic status relative to women. The economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson have found that trade shocks — in which localities suffer manufacturing job losses as a result of foreign competition — reduce the earnings of young men relative to young women, and consequently see lower marriage and fertility rates.
All of which is to say, right-wing nationalists aren’t wrong to believe that deindustrialization contributed to many of the economic and social trends that they decry.
But it does not follow that Trump can reverse these trends by imposing giant tariffs on Vietnam, Bangladesh, and floating chunks of ice in the sub-Antarctic Indian Ocean.
In the nationalist right’s account, the decline of manufacturing employment was the contingent result of bad trade policies: Were it not for the machinations of globalist elites, the past half-century of factory closures could have been averted.
But this is false. America’s pursuit of free trade surely influenced the scale and speed of deindustrialization. With a different set of trade policies, manufacturing employment in the US could have been marginally higher today.
Nevertheless, the United States was bound to see a massive reduction in manufacturing employment over the past 50 years, no matter what trade policy it pursued.
The reasons are twofold: First, as consumers get wealthier, they spend less of their income on goods and more on services. Humanity’s appetite for appliances, cars, and other physical objects is more exhaustible than its desire for better health or higher investment returns. In 1960, Americans devoted more than 50 percent of their consumer spending to goods; by 2010, that figure had fallen to 33 percent.
Thus, to keep up with shifts in consumer demand, advanced economies need to dedicate more labor to the provision of health care, financial advice, and other services, and less to the production of durable goods.
Second, manufacturing is easier to automate than services. Goods production requires the performance of repetitive tasks in a controlled environment. This makes it easier to mechanize than medical care, education, or even food service: Robots are better at assembling standardized products (such as cars) than customizable ones (such as Chipotle burritos).
For these reasons, manufacturing’s share of employment has been falling in all rich countries over the past 50 years. Even in Japan, which has promoted manufacturing through protectionist trade policy and government subsidies, the percentage of workers employed in manufacturing has fallen to just over 15 percent.
And this same trend is beginning to surface in China: Despite that nation’s massive trade surplus, its manufacturing sector went from employing 30.3 percent of all workers in 2013 to 29.1 percent in 2023.
According to the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf, were the US to entirely eliminate its trade deficit in goods, manufacturing’s share of US employment would at most return to its level from two decades ago, leaving roughly 85 percent of US workers employed in other sectors.
There is little reason to believe that Trump’s tariffs will actually succeed in strengthening US manufacturing. To the contrary, they will massively increase the costs of producing goods in the United States, inspire foreign nations to erect new barriers to American exports, and make companies more reluctant to invest in new factories due to economic uncertainty, all of which will hurt domestic manufacturing.
But even if the president’s trade policies somehow proved exceptionally effective, they would not bring back the industrial economy of yesteryear.
None of this means that America must resign itself to low wage growth or high inequality. The decline of manufacturing may have been inevitable, but the rise of a more inegalitarian economic order was not. In social democratic Denmark, the decline of manufacturing employment coincided with falling inequality, according to the IMF.
And although productivity gains have historically been higher in manufacturing than in services, this has become less true over time. Certain service sectors — such telecommunications and transport — have seen faster gains in output per worker hour than manufacturing in recent decades.
America can build a more dynamic and egalitarian economy without reengineering mass manufacturing employment. Collective bargaining helped factory workers wield leverage over their employers in the postwar period. And it could help all workers do so today, if the US established a system of sectoral bargaining.
Demand for manufacturing labor may be inherently limited. But in other sectors, demand for blue-collar labor is artificially constrained by regulation. America has 4.5 million fewer homes than it needs. By eliminating restrictive zoning laws, and providing cheap financing to the housing sector, we can meet one of our nation’s most pressing economic needs while expanding opportunities for manual workers. And one can tell a similar story about promoting infrastructure construction or the green energy buildout.
Increasing the affordability of college and trade schools can further help workers acquire the skills demanded by a modern, services-dominant economy. And a more comprehensive social welfare state can ease the burdens of future labor shocks, such as the one that artificial intelligence threatens to deliver to some white-collar workers.
The right’s desire to increase men’s economic leverage over women is morally objectionable, even if such inequality is conducive to higher marriage or birth rates. All Americans, regardless of gender, are equally deserving of opportunity. But reducing young men’s unemployment — and increasing their wages — would enhance their well-being, while shrinking the number of women who involuntarily forgo marriage and motherhood due to an absence of financially independent partners.
But Trump’s policies are unlikely to advance any of his movement’s purported aims. His tariffs are poised to reduce real wages, depress housing construction, and increase unemployment. And his labor agenda aims to restrict collective bargaining rights, rather than expand them.
Americans deserve an economy in which blue-collar work is more remunerative, opportunity is broadly shared, and material obstacles to family formation are less profound. But building that economy will require an unsentimental analysis of our economy’s present, not nostalgia-addled efforts to resurrect its past.
2025-04-04 00:45:00
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited West Virginia on March 28 to promote his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda at an event where he cruelly criticized state Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s weight. Kennedy suggested that he would host a public weigh-in and celebration once Morrisey had shed 30 pounds, and Kennedy had an idea about how the governor could do it: “We’re going to put him on a carnivore diet,” Kennedy said.
Weeks before, science journalist and meat enthusiast Nina Teicholz argued in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled “Meat Will Make America Healthy Again” that when the US government updates its dietary guidelines this year, it needs to keep meat firmly at the center of the plate.
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“The Trump administration can ensure that federal dietary guidelines recognize the role of high-quality protein in improving Americans’ health,” Teicholz wrote. (In her view, “high-quality protein” comes from animals, while protein from plants is “inferior.”)
Meat industry groups, such as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Pork Board, have made similar pleas. Lucky for them, Kennedy and US Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins — who so far has acted in lockstep with the meat industry — are in charge of publishing the new federal dietary guidelines, which are updated every five years.
But the push to get Americans to eat more meat goes against what the government’s own nutrition experts recommend. In December, a government-commissioned expert committee recommended the federal dietary guidelines be updated to encourage Americans to eat less red and processed meat and more protein from plant-based sources, like beans and lentils.
And it’s unclear what era of meat supremacy Teicholz means to invoke when she says meat will make America healthy again. Americans are eating more meat — and other animal products — than ever, and it doesn’t seem to be making us any healthier, though, as rates of diet-related diseases like cancer, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes remain high.
Teasing apart cause and effect in nutrition research is notoriously messy and complicated, and our high levels of meat consumption alone can’t explain America’s high rates of chronic disease — other factors, like consumption of highly processed sugary and salty foods, along with rates of exercise, alcohol and tobacco intake, health care access, and exposure to pollution, also determine health outcomes. But study after study has found that high meat consumption can increase our risk of diet-related chronic diseases.
While many Americans might like to hear that our abnormally high levels of meat consumption is actually healthy and virtuous — and that we need to eat even more of it — nutrition research largely shows that we would be better off if we did the very opposite.
A significant body of research shows that when people eat more healthy plant-based foods, like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes, they can lower their risk of heart disease, certain types of cancer, Type 2 diabetes, and premature death. When they eat more meat — especially red and processed meats — they can increase that risk. Two recently published studies bear this out.
Last week, a paper published in the journal Nature Medicine found that eating more plant-based foods — along with fewer animal products and ultraprocessed foods — is linked to a higher likelihood of healthy aging, defined as reaching 70 years of age without suffering from major chronic diseases and maintaining good cognitive, mental, and physical health.
“Our findings suggest that dietary patterns rich in plant-based foods, with moderate inclusion of healthy animal-based foods, may enhance overall healthy aging,” the researchers wrote. (There are many reasons to eat a fully plant-based diet, like animal welfare and environmental sustainability, but there isn’t a strong case to be made that optimal health requires forgoing animal products entirely.)
Many MAHA supporters fall prey to the same fallacy of many liberal food reformers: the belief that only what is “natural” is good.
Weeks earlier, a paper published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine found that butter consumption was linked to increased risk of both cancer mortality and mortality overall, while consumption of plant-based seed oils was associated with lower overall mortality, along with lower cancer and cardiovascular disease deaths.
The general consensus that more plants and less meat can improve public health has been promoted by the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and leading medical institutions. It has also driven the EAT-Lancet Commission, a large, global committee of nutrition and sustainability experts, to advocate for a diet that would reduce the average American’s consumption of meat by about 75 percent.
For a time, going in that direction seemed like it might be possible. Americans ate less meat during the Great Recession, even if it was done primarily to save money rather than improve personal health. And through the 2010s, the term “flexitarian” rose to prominence as a significant share of Americans told pollsters they were cutting back on meat while the benefits of plant-based eating entered the zeitgeist thanks to celebrities like Beyoncé and Lizzo. By the early 2020s, the hype around new-and-improved plant-based meat and milk products from startup darlings Beyond Meat, Oatly, and Impossible Foods became inescapable.
But this all proved to be more show than substance — American consumption of meat, dairy, and eggs has only increased over the last decade.
And the proverbial vibe has shifted from the days of buzzy Impossible burgers and skipping meat on Mondays. The health halo around “plant-based” products has worn thin — in part due to flimsy science and a mass PR campaign funded by the meat industry — while meat consumption is once again culturally ascendant, as The Atlantic’s Yasmin Tayag captured last week. The signs are everywhere, Tayag notes: declining plant-based meat sales, America’s protein fixation, the rise of the “manosphere,” and the belief of some of its loudest voices that masculinity requires eating lots of meat.
Messages of moderation in the annals of American nutrition research appear to be no match against the popularity of carnivore diet devotees, protein maxxing, and MAHA-aligned health influencers who rail against cooking with seed oils while praising butter and beef tallow.
After decades of government hesitance to confront the roots of America’s biggest diet-related health crises, Kennedy and the MAHA coalition’s promises to challenge large food companies and address chronic disease head-on is refreshing. But its prescription is more vibes and anecdotes than evidence. The MAHA coalition doesn’t appear to ever question our high levels of animal product consumption, for example, but rather wants to increase it, and in supposedly “natural” forms: raw milk over nondairy milk, butter and beef tallow over seed oils, and grass-fed beef over feedlot beef.
In this way, many MAHA supporters fall prey to the same fallacy of many liberal food reformers: the belief that only what is “natural” is good. But milk is now pasteurized because raw milk can make people terribly sick, plant-based seed oils are likely healthier than butter, and grass-fed beef is worse for the planet and hardly better for you.
While beans and lentils are less protein-dense than meat — and are less easily digested, as Teicholz rightly points out in her op-ed, if only slightly — they’re also free of cholesterol, extremely low in saturated fat, and loaded with fiber, which, unlike protein, more than 90 percent of Americans are deficient in. (And they’re still a great source of protein.)
Calls to make America healthy again by eating more meat than ever may be politically popular — who doesn’t want to feel empowered to do something that for so long people have been made to feel bad about? But there is a cost to this collective dismissal of nutrition and public health research: Some research has shown that countries would save on health care costs if their citizens ate more plant-rich diets.
If the Trump administration is sincere about cost cutting, and RFK Jr. is sincere about making America healthier, they both ought to take that advice to heart.
2025-04-03 22:15:00
Democratic voters just won a 10-point landslide in a state that President Donald Trump won last year. How?
The answer is a defining trend of modern elections: There are two different kinds of electorates who come out to vote in the Trump era.
On Tuesday night, the liberal, Democrat-aligned Judge Susan Crawford defeated her Republican-backed opponent by nearly 300,000 votes — a 10-point margin — less than a year after Trump carried the state on his way to a battleground sweep.
She achieved that victory as more than 2.3 million people turned out to vote, about two-thirds of last year’s electorate. That’s significantly more than the last time a high-profile court seat was up for grabs and nearly matches the level of turnout in the 2022 midterms.
Crawford’s victory has been cast as symbolic for many reasons. It’s both a referendum on the months-old Trump administration and on Elon Musk for his involvement and spending in the race. It was a test of liberal organizing and Democratic enthusiasm ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, as the party’s base demands their leaders do more and they look for ways to resist Trump.
But Wisconsin’s weird voting dynamics in the Trump era, combined with other national special and off-year elections, also demonstrate the role Trump has played in scrambling electoral coalitions and see-sawing the balance of power both in Washington and in the states.
Two different electorates, polarized by education, class, and political engagement, have emerged — one which benefits Democrats broadly, another which benefits solely Trump himself.
Wisconsin in the age of Trump has been a curious place to watch. As a battleground for presidential and state-level contests, it has swung wildly between barely electing a Republican or Democratic presidential candidate, and delivering comfortable margins for liberals and Democrats running in off-year or midterm cycles.
A clear story emerges when looking at overall turnout, county-specific demographics, Democratic enthusiasm, and polling in Wisconsin. And that story fits into a pattern of elections in the state. Wisconsin’s 2025 electorate was deeply Democratic: made up of not just the most informed and engaged voters, but also some lower-propensity voters who were persuaded to flip. As the data journalist Steve Kornacki pointed out ahead of the election, in off-year contests when Trump isn’t on the ballot, pro-Trump blue-collar white voters have been less motivated to vote than have anti-Trump college-educated voters.
That dynamic leads to results like Tuesday night’s, when turnout in the most highly educated, Democratic parts of the state was much higher than turnout in the more non-college-educated, pro-Trump places. An emblematic location was Dane County, home of Madison: Crawford received more net votes and a higher share of the vote than the Democrats’ 2022 Senate nominee Mandela Barnes.
Wisconsin is just the latest example of how two different electorates are determining the balance of power in America.
When Trump is on the ballot, lower-propensity, non-college-educated, and (more recently) disaffected voters of color are more likely to turn out and vote for him, even if they don’t necessarily vote for other Republicans.
That was a factor that contributed not just to Harris’s loss in 2024, but also to Senate and House Democrats’ overperformance in swing states. Democratic Senate candidates like Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, and Baldwin in Wisconsin all outran Harris’s performance and won their respective races, in part because Republican turnout for Trump didn’t trickle its way down the ballot.
When Trump is not on the ballot, highly motivated, high-information, and disaffected anti-Trump voters (some of them former Republicans) still turn out, or turn out at even higher rates for Democratic candidates — and those candidates still win over some share of Republicans who can be persuaded to vote for a Democrat. At the same time, lower-propensity Trump voters stay home.
This is a historic shift. For most of the last 30 years, it’s been the Republican Party that has had the more attuned, higher-propensity voters who would turn out in off-year elections, and so would benefit from a smaller electorate. Democrats were the ones struggling to get their voters to the polls when Barack Obama wasn’t on the ballot. But the Republican Party has been trading away many of those higher-propensity, college-educated, and wealthier voters to the Democrats in the Trump era, as Democrats lost more white, non-college-educated voters.
This pattern was again demonstrated in Wisconsin this week, but also in special elections across the country. In Florida’s First and Sixth Congressional Districts, a share of Republican voters who turned out voted for Democratic candidates, particularly in the First District, which has more of a college-educated electorate. This was also a factor in the 2022 midterms, when states like Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia had plurality-Republican electorates that still ended up sending Democratic Senate candidates to Congress.
Democrats are celebrating this most recent win in Wisconsin, and there are clear signs that the next year stands to see a score of Democratic victories in statewide and House elections. But the dynamic that is saving them in off years might not rescue them in the next presidential election (in which Trump will presumably not be on the ballot). They may have more lessons to learn about how to take advantage of the fundamentals that benefit them right now, and they surely have lessons to learn about how to counter Trump’s influence before the next presidential cycle.