There are other kinds of workers who want ‘dignity’

Since Liberation Day, my feed has been full of panicked, apocalyptic screeching, even more than usual. It hasn’t been useful. No, Janet, President Trump is not “trying to kill us all.” Instead, I’ve been seeking out intelligent, thoughtful analyses of our new Tariff Age, particularly from people who think that this is an actual good idea. There aren’t a ton of these people, but there are some.

Pro-tariff voices that I’ve encountered include: journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon, who shocked the world when she came out as a “MAGA lefty” and is riding that identity toward a glorious future. Another is a Twitter account called “Insurrection Barbie,” which I take with an enormous salt lick. There’s the historian Victor Davis Hanson; and, most legitimately of all, economist and former Mitt Romney advisor Oren Cass, a longtime advocate for tariffs.

In interviews with sources as ideologically diverse as Jon Stewart and Breitbart News, Cass has been making the case for tariffs as the key to an American manufacturing revival. In 1970, 25 percent of American jobs were in factories. Now it’s closer to 10. Cass posits that an ideal number lies somewhere in between, like 17 to 18 percent of the workforce. And no, these wouldn’t be shoe or garment sweatshops. They would be highly automated factories, full of skilled, educated workers, making things like microchips and replacement parts for the robot overlords who will soon rule us all.

That all sounds sensible, a far cry from all the crowing about the American worker that is mostly coming from pro-tariff voices. Who is this mythical “American worker,” I wonder, and where is he working? Intrepid reporters and commentators spend a lot of time in rural diners interviewing old guys in red caps who bemoan that the world is just not what it used to be. They idealize the working man in a way that would make Karl Marx blush.

The policies of the Trump Restoration are clearly angled to benefit forgotten Americans in decaying Rust Belt cities and small-town Appalachia. Stopping the flow of fentanyl at the border benefits everyone, but it benefits working-class people most of all. This is undeniably good.

But not every American worker is the kind of mythically noble forgotten Joe Lunchbucket that tariff proponents love to put on the pedestals of their minds. American workers are living in Blue America, too.

The New York Times published an article last week about the Gen-X career meltdown that had the usual panicked people all a-flutter. And with good reason. The article depicted a generation struggling to keep up with an unstable political environment, social change and TikTok influencing. This is not what MTV promised them, back when the world was young. The article spends a lot of time focusing on a guy who once had a really good job as an editor at Spin magazine but now is having trouble making ends meet.

On the one hand, you’re not going to engender broad public sympathy for a guy who no longer works at Spin magazine because of mean computers. But I found myself thinking: isn’t this guy also an American worker? Doesn’t he also deserve dignity and security and something worthwhile to do on the backend of his life that doesn’t just involve being afraid of the President on Facebook? The Vanishing Middle Class isn’t only comprised of people whose fathers once worked the Ford line in Dearborn. You’re not going to be able to build enough factories to hold us all.

And I say “us all” because I include myself in that category. Amid all the early tariff hoopla, I made the questionable decision of downloading my Social Security statement. I won’t reveal exactly the amount I’ve made over the years, but it’s hardly a number that would make Joe Lunchbucket’s jaw drop in envy and disdain. The amount the government owes me when I go out to pasture isn’t a whole lot.

I’m also an American worker. It just so happens that I’m not a laborer. Despite my advancing age, my hands are as soft as a fontanelle. But I still feel like I deserve more for my efforts than a head full of AI-generated memes and a feed full of people named Dennis posting things like “you had a good run, America.” There are a lot of people like me, non-elite “knowledge workers,” who are also looking for dignity, meaning, and a relatively soft landing at the end of life.

The one solace I’ve taken from this confusing week is that the people who are screeching loudest about how Trump’s tariffs will ruin our bank accounts and will make our vacations abroad more expensive are the same people who’ve been wrong about everything the last four years. They’re the ones who called the George Floyd riots “mostly peaceful” and assured us that Joe Biden was a sentient human president. They were the most fervent advocates of Covid lockdowns, mask mandates and school closures. If they think tariffs are a bad idea, then the tariffs must be a good idea. Maybe even the best idea.

As an American worker, non-labor division, I know where I’ll place my bets, and my hopes.