“Their entire economy will just implode without our money. It will hurt but ultimately these tariffs are what needs to happen for us to rebuild our country.”
Then he was telling me about how Bill Maher, this “super liberal Hollywood guy” met with trump, and how impressed he was, and how genuine trump was, and how Trump knew all about him, and oh my god guys trump is such a genuine guy. What you see is what you get, and he “actually cares about people”. Even the liberals (everyone to the left of Bill fucking Maher I guess) see how great trump is.
Anyway I kinda hate my dad and I wish I could leave this hellhole.
I wish I knew why Westerners think they need to destroy China
I mean, I know why, because they think this shit is a zero sum game of domination. But what do they think will happen when this is all over, even if they were correct (which they aren’t).
China will become a copy of the US (i.e. no public infrastructure, rent seeking/enshittification as the main economy, shitty chain restaurants, Walmart, 20’ tall pickup trucks/SUVs, etc.) and the Chinese people will worship white people as saviors. Whitey will get to go to China, take whatever he wants, abuse whoever he wants, and exploit anything he sees.
The main wish? Whitey’s foreign policy problems will go away. No China means a return to USA being #1 with the military to back it up.
They already have these (well, they have Costco), at least. So the transition won’t be rough in terms of treats.
America really saw the demise of it’s greatest adversary, the USSR, and promptly forgot that happened and while things keep declining here decided it’s China’s fault suddenly and if they could only defeat them then we’ll really be free this time f’real
For the rank and file at least, I think a lot of it comes from a lifetime of unexamined white supremacy. If China emerges as a legitimate opposing pole or worse surpasses the US, that means that maybe whitey isn’t #1 at everything.
It’s called propaganda
I’m pretty sure it’s really just trying to cling to the idea of the US as the dominant global imperial power. Not in those terms, ofc, but that’s what it is.
The way liberals play it kinda is zero sum, but I know what you mean
The true believers I’ve seen online are all 100% convinced that the reshoring of manufacturing will happen overnight. As if all the factories are sitting there, just waiting for the lights to turn back on, and that the institutional knowledge needed to run the factories is a given. They treat any questioning of the material barriers to reshoring as a lack of faith in the elbow greasing powers of the American entrepreneurial spirit.
I will say that these are predictions made almost entirely by people who do not work in manufacturing, or if they do work in manufacturing, they have very limited contact with Asia and over-value the overall quality of their production (even if they may have better quality standards in particular products). Anybody I know who actually has experience working with Asia and Asia manufacturing are incredibly pessimistic about the effects of this, because the main reason that things are ‘still’ in Asia is because there is no work force to sustain American production. It doesn’t matter if you reshore it if there is no one to work it.
Oh yeah, it’s either people with no experience romanticizing the mid-20th century “golden” era or it’s boomers that retired from their legacy manufacturing job 15+ years ago and have completely outdated notions of what modern manufacturing is like.