Last week, a shocking moment of truth broke through the huge effort elites normally put into hiding their disdain for the rest of us. At an event sponsored by the libertarian Cato Institute, President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Adam Posen—a man who appears to be paid $450,000 a year—made clear his absolute contempt for the working class.
"The fetish for manufacturing is part of the general fetish for keeping white males of low education outside the cities in the powerful positions they are in in the U.S.," Posen said. As proof, Posen argued that no one cared when recessions hurt Black Americans.
Posen's words revealed more than he probably wanted to, like the elitist sentiment of wanting people with less education to have less power, or the way rich elites pander to Black Americans by mentioning them to shut down conversations about class disparities, or the ignorant and racist view that Black Americans don't work in manufacturing.
But maybe even worse than the social justice racism was that Posen admitted that manufacturing provides people without a college degree with good jobs, which in turn provide them with political power. And though his woke racism may prevent him from realizing it, bringing back manufacturing to the U.S. would provide jobs and business opportunities to every demographic—not just white males.
Why would Posen erase working class Black men or working class women from what would be the benefits of reshoring manufacturing? It gets the Left-wing equity crowd on board with the kind of stupidity involved in opposing bringing back manufacturing. And why would someone oppose bringing back manufacturing? Well, who could possibly want to help "white males with low education" as Posen called them?
Posen is not the only one to show how wokeness and elitism go hand in hand, enabling a member of the overeducated elite like Posen to arrive at the fantasy that white men without a college degree somehow have their hands on the levers of power such that anyone could be involved in "keeping" them there.
And it is a fantasy. Those of us in the "low educated" working class are not in control of anything you see going on in the world. The highly educated are running everything—something they are well aware of. Whether it's in politics or the media or the wealthy or the professional managerial class, the power centers of America are made up of people with degrees, lots of them.
They are terrified of the political power of people like me. Of course, to us, it's hard to imagine things being worse than they are. You have to be pretty wealthy to believe that were we to have some of our modest political desires put into practice, America would combust.
The worst part about it is that returning manufacturing to the U.S. would help innumerable Black Americans. Because it would help everyone—for exactly the reason Posen laid out: It would restore political power to the working class, at least to a small degree.
The fact that manufacturing jobs in the country have been declining should be at the front of everyone's minds. The fact that major corporations have exported a large amount of their manufacturing to China and displaced Americans from those jobs is something that is having a profound effect on many of my fellow blue collar workers who I have spoken to. Many towns that had manufacturing jobs outsourced to China or Mexico are now a shadow of their former selves, and many of those towns struggle with record levels of drugs and poverty among those who have been left behind.
It turns out that when the jobs leave and people lose their livelihoods, they tend to lose their sense of meaning. Despair sets in and down the rabbit hole of addiction many people go. Men without a college degree are leading the nation in deaths of despair, but elites like Posen only see "powerful positions"!
But manufacturing doesn't just benefit the person who gets a job. It has a ripple effect across a community because it provides business opportunities to all the ancillary aspects of manufacturing. Someone has to be able to fix the machines. Someone has to feed the workers. Someone has to build their homes. Manufacturing is a tide that lifts many boats.
But people like Posen would rather the American economy be full of end users and service jobs that are generally lower paid and low skilled. This is a war on the middle class. But it's also a war on everyone else. When your entire pharmaceutical industry is in another country, that makes every American vulnerable. When your entire military industrial complex is reliant on semiconductors manufactured in a country controlled by your biggest rival, every American is vulnerable. When all your PPE is made in China, you are endangering your entire population.
Other countries should not be able to bring us on our knees whenever they want.
America: You have the blue collar workers ready, willing, and able to produce and manufacture products. The government is getting in the way of that.
Small town America can come back and back in a big way—for all Americans, white and Black—if we stop listening to people like Adam Posen.
Charles Stallworth is a union railroad worker.
The views in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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