The true meaning of “progressive” and “conservative” among the chattering classes is rather literal. One group only progresses forwards. The other believes, or would like to believe, in the possibility of preserving the status quo of a given time. This means, logically, that what was progressive—what was left-coded—one year could become conservative-coded the next. Today’s conservative is often yesterday’s liberal. Conservatism and progressive liberalism are not fixed ideologies, but relational ones, constantly adjusting to each other, defining themselves in opposition to the other side.
The discourse around tariffs, and really the moral panic around April 2nd —so-called Liberation Day—makes this observation self-evident. Not only was everyone on social media suddenly an expert in trade policy, but the Internet Left was suddenly convinced that it had always been in favor of free trade. “It’s the largest peacetime tax hike in American history”, Robert Reich fretted on Substack.
Rachel Maddow, who, on MSNBC, extensively covered the backlash against free trade and NAFTA during the 2016 campaign, was no less sanguine: “The scale of the destruction that [Trump] has wrought is a little bit hard to get your head around”. Maddow’s and Reich’s progressive takes were indistinguishable from the reaction from the neoliberal center and from old guard Reaganites. “The country that created, and has gained mightily from, the global trade system is now trying to destroy it”, Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of the Economist, wrote in response to Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs. John Cassidy, writing in the New Yorker, framed the President’s tariff policy not as strategic protectionism but as “economic self-harm”. “Tariffs will drive the cost of everything up. In other words, it will be paid for by American consumers”, warned Sen. Mitch McConnell on 60 Minutes.
What policy lever did the WTO protesters in Seattle in 1999—or readers of Naomi Klein—imagine would end globalized, free, or what used to be called “unfair” trade? Do they have a better idea than high tariffs? I feel that in this very reaction, in this discursive panic, there’s evidence—as with COVID and pandemic politics—that leftist technocracy has silently, or not so silently, eliminated labor as the subject of historical progress. The felt, historical loss of security and economic prosperity produced by “free” trade is minimized; the technical, pragmatic inefficiency of changing course is amplified. “Of course, we care about the working classes and manufacturing, but this is just inefficiently done, stupidly, unthinkingly enacted. It has no chance of working. It will take years to build factories”.
What policy lever did the WTO protesters in Seattle in 1999 or readers of Naomi Klein imagine would end free trade? Do they have a better idea than high tariffs?
The media/technocratic caste, broadly speaking, seems unable—or unwilling—to imagine that new kinds of factories could be built quickly. In times of technological explosion and advance, and with proper economic incentives, certainly, they have been before. Nor can they seem to entertain the idea that many non-industrial industries invisible to the coastal commentariat—like shrimping—might actually stand to benefit from tariffs.
A certain economic logic has become axiomatic. Nominal progressives, as well as nominal conservatives, struggle to theorize about a society that is not girded by cheap foreign labor, debt, and consumption. The commentariat lacks imagination. Yet high GDP, high stocks, and cheap iPhones are not good in themselves, if they rise in inverse proportion to the physical and mental health of communities. The conceptual addiction to the economic status quo isn’t justified by the way things feel: there is no equivalent panic in the face of slower-moving material and spiritual decline—atomization, empty towns, high suicide rates and low birth rates.
I also reject the idea that progressivism must always chase what hasn’t happened yet. Why should the only moral horizon lie in the future? What is called “conservative”—to go back—can be progressive in its intent: to relieve suffering. If something from the past worked better, why is returning to it unthinkable? There’s no virtue in novelty for its own sake, just as there’s no virtue in growth that corrodes the people it’s supposed to serve.
Nominal progressives, as well as nominal conservatives, struggle to theorize about a society that is not girded by cheap foreign labor, debt, and consumption. The commentariat lacks imagination.
I don’t see union leaders—tariffs “are a lifeline for American steelworkers,” according to UAQ president Sean Fain—cited by liberal-progressive thought leaders. Rather, progressives defer to the technocratic notion that the tariffs have been deployed too ham-handedly, in too Trumpian a way to work. Zephyr Teachout argues, anxiously, that “neoliberals are trying to hijack Democratic Party trade policy using these disastrous Trump tariffs as an excuse”, while ignoring the reality: the Democratic Party has long since ceased to be anything other than neoliberal—than a trust fund for the already-affluent—and will willingly overlook any positives from the tariffs because of politics.
And I do think, in theory, that short-term disruption to recalibrate Americans to buy American-made products will prove to be a net good in ways that will not be visible to affluent coastals. I say this cautiously—as a non-economist who grew up in Bethlehem, PA, surrounded by shuttered steel mills, in what remains the largest brownfield site in the United States. I heard stories of the ’70s and ’80s, and the devastation free trade brought to labor. China Shock is within living memory, and I likewise remember a sudden collective job loss around 2003 among my friends’ parents.
As John Gray writes in The New Leviathans, “The concept of decline has been cancelled from the Western lexicon. If it is allowed at all, it is only as a pedagogic device signifying a history that can be corrected”. It’s almost like there is a collective guilt, among the commentariat, about the direction of the last 30 or 40 years of American history. “Small businesses in the US will be bearing the brunt of constantly changing tariff policies that are forcing them to raise prices for consumers”, Adam Leeb, CEO of Astrohaus, told CNN. Yet the winner-take-all economy has hollowed out town after town while enriching tech workers, government workers, and financial workers almost exclusively. Returning to the past necessarily entails admitting that there were some elements of the past that worked better than the present. It would mean recognizing that the information and service economy, if it becomes too great a share of the total economy, leaves too many people out. And that the technocratic, hygienic utopia of the office or the work-from-home Zoom setup is implicitly and meaningfully degrading for some people who would rather work with their hands.
Returning to the past necessarily entails admitting that there were some elements of the past that worked better than the present.
On a simple level, I wonder why more people who don’t work with their hands—like writers, thought leaders, whatever—can’t displace their subjectivity a little bit, for a second long enough to think like someone else: someone who has not invested in stocks; someone who doesn’t live in New York or Austin or San Francisco or L.A. or Washington; someone who remembers losing their factory job, or their father losing his factory job, or their grandfather. I wonder why it’s considered perniciously regressive or conservative to enact that imaginative displacement. To me, this is a catastrophic failure of our discursive machinery: certain points of view are not allowed into public debate, and those that are allowed are less anchored in empiricism and in the actual lines of history than in abstracted, caste identities—identities abstracted from material reality.
I wonder why more people who don’t work with their hands can’t displace their subjectivity a little bit to think like someone else: someone who’s not invested in stocks; someone who doesn’t live in New York or Austin or San Francisco or L.A.
The ideology, moreover, of those who consider themselves to have received a liberal education—most people in the media, I would say—should in theory be able to move omnidirectionally, should be able to move around the ideological map, and at least conceive of the reasons why someone is in a certain position rather than another. Rather than insist that there’s only one utopian, basically religious, mode of right-thinking. I didn’t know that free trade and hyper-consumerism were the only right way to live and build civilization. But now I guess I’ve been told.
