Abundance

by Ezra Klein

China has been the great shadow pressure on American politics over the past two decades. The confidence brought by the fall of the Soviet Union has been replaced by a fear that China has learned what we’ve forgotten. In Washington, a consensus began to crumble. Republicans and Democrats alike had been too complacent about what China’s rise meant for American workers and too certain that a richer China would embrace American values. But the blindness was not just about what China was capable of. It was also about what America was losing the capacity to do. It’s no accident that the most forceful challenge to this miasma of complacency and fear came from Donald Trump—a “builder” whose economic appeal centered around an obsession with manufacturing jobs and a deep suspicion of trade. America’s political and economic class had ceased to see the value in making things. Workers were told to learn how to code even as Washington kept proving that America had forgotten how to build. Trump didn’t care whether you knew how to code, but he seemed viscerally disgusted that America couldn’t build as it once could, and that it didn’t value the people who’d once done that work.