An enormous amount of the self-destructive effort poured into the Trump administration’s global war on trade has been justified on the Rustpolitik theory that the decline of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest is a social crisis of sufficient proportions that it delegitimizes the entire national and global economic order and justifies an “anything would be better than the status quo” approach.

Now, I’d submit that you can take seriously the human costs of industrial decline in the region without........

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