Factory Man Vs. Space Boy
Oh Trump is bringing the 1950s back? Which 1950s, exactly??
I rarely write about politics here, and generally regret it when I do so. Yet faith is a virtue, and I believe I have some morsel to offer that is more nutritious than another litany of the day’s horrors, which other, more informed writers perform far more effectively than me. Or perhaps I’ll regret this too—you, dear VDL readers, will have to let me know.
I can’t help but follow the news about the 31 flavors of trade tariffs that Trump is inflicting upon the global economy. The man knows how to make a graphic, what can I say. Don’t worry though, I am not going to delve into the weeds of each and every tariff here (46% on Vietnam? How, Sway?), for the good reason that I don’t understand any of that horse puckey. I barely passed Econ 151 in college. It took everything in me to eke out a D in that class. An extra special mind like that mine was meant to contemplate metaphors in Romantic poetry, not the fluctuations and eructations in the bond market.
But lack of understanding never stopped a Substacker from opining before!
Really, though, I don’t think the nitty-gritty of the actual figures matters all that much to understanding the motivations behind the tariffs. Those motivations are far less economic, and far more psychological in nature. I am convinced, in fact, that the reasoning here, such as it is, has little to do with stock markets, and much more to do with gender and masculinity.
Author, podcaster and all-around online guy Jason Pargin has a TikTok video where he explains all of this. You can watch that here. Basically, Pargin says that Trumpists (and more than just them, really—that’s part of the problem) view office work as feminizing and emasculating. A man who works in an office is, consequently and inevitably, less of a man. Offices, with their politicking and compliance meetings and HR departments. (Tell that to Don Draper.)
So where should men work if they want to become Real Men? Factories! Like in the 50s! Like Adrien Brody in The Brutalist, pumping himself full of benzedrine so he can construct a bridge over the Susquehanna River! Get America’s men out of the offices, and back into the factories, and they’ll become Real Men again.
That is, in theory, what tariffs do. Make importing Good X so expensive that the American economy, that perfectly rational creature, produces it in-house instead. No more cheap Chinese goods produced by poorly paid laborers! Now we’ll have American goods produced by Real American Men! Except, they sure won’t belong to unions, cause unions are bad! Obviously!
Stupid, yes, but it does possess a certain internal consistency, as far as inchoate yearnings go. Office Make Man Bad, Factory Make Man Good. It fits on a bumper sticker. Yet what is truly infuriating is how brazenly the Trump Tariff Plan goes against everything else the administration has been doing. I’m sure you’ve that heard Elon Musk’s DOGE has been gutting the federal workforce, and it has been doing so by using AI tools to compile vast amounts of data into easy-to-digest PowerPoint presentations. Hell, even the tariffs themselves seem to have been calculated using ChatGPT. And I don’t know if you’re aware, but the whole point of AI tools is that they use automation to free up human labor. To close factories, basically. The very factories that supposedly make men Real Again!
The history of the postwar US seems to be recapturing, or trying to recapture, the 1950s. Reagan tried to do that in the 80s with his Cold War 2.0. Trump tried to do that in 2016 with his promise of recreating an America where the white man was on top and black and brown people knew their place. And now it seems that the Trump admin is trying to recreate two different, and flatly contradictory, visions of the 50s.
On the one hand, you have the Factory Man 50s, where men carried their lunch pails down to the smelting refinery, then clocked out at the end of the shift to return to their housewives and five children, supporting all of them with factory wages. (Which were unionized, as everyone seems to forget.) On the other hand, you have the Space Boy 50s, the vision of the future as promised in comic books and sci-fi movies, where robots performed our menial tasks while humanity explored the stars. It’s The Flintstones vs The Jetsons.
And—it will not work. Neither scenario is likely to work on its own. The US simply cannot construct a manufacturing base to offset the loss in foreign goods anytime soon. (Ezra Klein covers this phenomenon, this inability to move quickly, in his own work. His go-to example is the long-promised, long-delayed California rail system, which, like the Mahdi in Islamic cosmology, yet remains hidden.) And the reality of AI automation is highly unlikely to match the promises offered by Sam Altman.
But believing one can accomplish both, at the same time? That is what is truly insane, and truly insulting.
It makes one long to bring back another 1950s tradition: a graduated income tax that taxes the wealthiest at a rate of 50%, rather than the far lower rates of today. Put that in place, and maybe we can actually build something for real, for men, women and everyone else.
I was in the middle of writing this when I learned that there is a new THOMAS PYNCHON novel coming out this October! It’s called Shadow Ticket, and looks to be a noir following a private detective in the 1930s. I love Pynchon, and I love it when he works in this noir mode, as he’s done in his later novels, so I am HYPE. Finally, some good news!
I will certainly cover this book once it comes out, either here or in some other venue. I’ll be sure to let you know once that happens!
OMG pynchon is still around! One forgets!