American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears

by Farah Stockman

In 1998, at the height of what has been called “free trade euphoria,” the philosopher Richard Rorty warned in his book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America about the impending fallout from the loss of factory jobs: Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported…. Something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.