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Southway urges America, Canada, and other westernized countries to reverse the negative effects of global free trade by bringing factory and manufacturing jobs back to North America. China and India are now producing things that were once made in the United States, their workers receiving starvation wages for jobs that, between 1920 and 1970, gave the American middle class the world’s highest standard of living. The nation imported an excess of cheap disposable goods while the great factory towns of post-war America—Detroit, St. Louis, Cincinnati—collapsed into crime and poverty. Young people, unable to find steady work and finding marriage unaffordable, are choosing to remain single.
The "liberalization of international trade," which accelerated rapidly in the final decades of the twentieth century, reached a grim apotheosis in 2001 when China joined the World Trade Organization. In the following years, America received six times the previous number of Chinese goods. Because corporations were now operating globally, they found ways of avoiding paying national taxes, weakening America's infrastructure and quality of life, and fostering a mood of national unrest that made Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump unlikely tribunes of discontent.
Southway does an admirable job of explaining how economic dislocation has provoked the cultural and political turmoil of the past decade. Though he leans right, his analysis cuts across ideological lines and should find a warm reception among many on the left. He effectively argues that too many young people who shouldn’t be there are attending college and that these students would benefit from attending a trade school that would guarantee them a dependable vocation. His dismissal of the humanities as a valid field of study might alienate some. Still, this timely and important book should resonate with many readers.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review