Free trade created your precious “traditional family”

The right is trying to kill global trade to protect the “traditional family.”

The first funny thing about this is that they’re actually talking about the male breadwinner model of marriage and not, as discussed, the actual traditional family of subsistence farmers. They’re confused because everyone on the right is either allergic to an accurate depiction of history or is a lying (sorry, “Straussian”) Nazi fuck.

The second funny thing about this is that the male breadwinner model of marriage was only ever available to anyone because:

1. The US military had reduced everyone else’s factories to rubble

2. FDR and his allies legalized and streamlined international trade to take advantage of global demand

Free(r) trade with the rest of the world created the post-war prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s that made the US the richest country on Earth.

That, along with decades of racially discriminatory federal housing policy and racially discriminatory labor unions, created a white middle class and high-paying jobs for bottom-half men in numbers never seen before (or since).

“[MAGA Republicans] are destroying everything that kept the world relatively prosperous and safe for the past 80 years,”

John Ganz

recently wrote.

If the GOP really wanted marriage rates to return to 1950s levels, tariffs would be the last thing they’d try. Marriage declines are happening almost exclusively among the bottom-half. Tariffs disproportionately fuck these households because they only "work" if they raise prices.

Right-wingers claim new jobs will justify price increases. But tariffs won’t meaningfully boost domestic manufacturing. They’re more likely to reduce it. Trump’s 2018-2019 tariffs cut net manufacturing employment. George W. Bush’s steel tariffs reduced domestic manufacturing employment. After the Civil War, high tariffs harmed US farmers by raising the cost of imported machinery. The coming trade war will also cripple the US and our allies, relative to China. Current tariffs are already hurting domestic manufacturing employment.

I don’t know why Trump is so big on tariffs and so uninterested in any solution that might actually help anyone. I do know that tariffs create nearly endless opportunities for whoever is in charge to punish their enemies and reward their friends with carve-outs and exemptions.

I’m sure it’s a total coincidence that Trump just legalized bribery and announced he’s taking offers.

Here’s more from Ganz:

One crucial thing I didn’t make explicit in my previous newsletter on FDR opening U.S. trade: it allowed the United States and its partners to avoid “beggar-thy-neighbor,” the great economist Joan Robinson’s term to describe the behavior of nations during the Great Depression who tried to use trade restrictions and currency depreciation to improve their economic situation at the expense of their neighbors, a practice which made everyone worse off in the end. She got the name from a card game similar to a game Americans might be more familiar with and is a better description of contemporary conditions: Egyptian Ratfuck. This zero-sum approach to trade is also a much better characterization of Trump’s attitude than “protectionism.”

Tariffs won’t do anything to help “the traditional family.” Which, along with not being traditional, also isn’t coming back. Luckily, that’s a good thing, because it was always a mistake. The nuclear family gave us loneliness and atomization on top of economic stagnation and ecological devastation.

(Nothing more populist than pimping a post-WWII CIA invention meant to bolster consumption in capitalist countries to enrich corporations and, somehow, defeat global communism. Read: labor protections.)

Trump is, however, hewing closely to another long American tradition: Using trade restrictions for cronyism to the detriment of all flavors of American families, especially those in the bottom-half.

“Perhaps one day studying FDR’s trade policy will help guide us out of this colossal mess,” Ganz wrote. I’m not holding my breath.