President Donald Trump’s defenders often frame his trade policies as prioritizing economic development over the free market.

In their telling, America has an interest in manufacturing valuable goods domestically, even if producing such wares in the US is not maximally profitable right now. Our nation might not currently make semiconductors as well as Taiwan or electric vehicles as well as China. But if we protect our nascent chip and EV industries, they might eventually become globally competitive. And that could make America wealthier, as the international market for such technologies will be large and opportunities for productivity gains in those industries are significant.

This is a reasonable argument for the utility of tariffs in some contexts. But it doesn’t amount to a case for Donald Trump’s tariffs.

On Wednesday, Trump announced that he will impose a 10 percent minimum tariff on all foreign imports, and much stiffer rates on most nations: 20 percent for goods made in the European Union, 46 percent for Vietnam, and 54 percent for China. In a sign of the policy’s intellectual caliber, the president also ordered a 10 percent tariff on all exports from two uninhabited Antarctic islands (perhaps on the assumption that penguins will soon develop opposable thumbs thumbs and heavy industry).

Traditionally, countries use tariffs and industrial policy to climb the international “value chain” — to go from producing simple goods (like T-shirts) or basic commodities (like lumber) to making complex products that are more valuable.

But Trump’s trade policies would move the United States down the value chain. His tariffs are not designed to foster domestic production of a few highly valuable, cutting-edge products. Rather, he aims to move more or less all forms of manufacturing to the United States. His tariffs apply to all imported goods, from kitchen mitts to airplanes.

As Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal notes, this would likely make the United States less competitive in the world’s most lucrative markets. If America lets poorer countries supply it with T-shirts and aluminum, it can dedicate more of its resources to producing semiconductors, airplanes, chemicals, medical equipment, software, and artificial intelligence.

The more capital and labor we must devote to providing ourselves with socks and aprons, the less we’ll have to expend on more fruitful enterprises.

Trump’s tariffs aren’t rooted in rational development aims. The president is not trying to dominate the industries of the future — he’s trying to bring back the economy of the past. Nostalgia is the point.

America’s right-wing nationalists associate the manufacturing-heavy economy of the 1950s and 1960s with a favored set of social and material conditions. It was an era when rates of wage growth, marriage, and fertility were high, and regional inequality was low. And they believe that they can bend the arc of history back toward that golden age by dramatically increasing US manufacturing employment.

But this is a fantasy. America can only return to the mid-century industrial economy in the sense that it can return to subsistence farming: It is technically possible to embrace an anachronistic mode of production, but only at immense economic cost.

Why the right longs for the postwar industrial economy

I don’t mean to assert that nostalgia is the driving force behind Trump’s trade agenda. Other motivations and intuitions are surely at play. For example, Trump seems to view trade as a zero-sum game, in which the loser is whichever country buys more goods than it sells.

Nevertheless, nostalgia for the postwar industrial economy suffuses the nationalist right’s rhetoric about trade policy, and informs its fixation on manufacturing employment.

In the “America first” movement’s narrative of national decline, deindustrialization — which is to say, the economy’s shift away from manufacturing and toward services — is synonymous with economic devastation and moral rot.

The basic story goes like this: In a bygone, golden era, American workers made things in factories, formed stable families, and coalesced into tight-knit communities. But then corrupt, globalist elites shipped US manufacturing jobs overseas, devastating middle-class workers in general — and male ones in particular. Marriage rates collapsed, communities frayed, and moral standards declined. By reshoring production, America’s former greatness can be restored.

As Trump explained in his first inaugural address, America’s fall from greatness began when “factories shuttered and left our shores” and the “wealth of our middle class” was “ripped from their homes,” leaving “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation”........

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