Forced Amnesia

In Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling 2016 memoir of “a family and a culture in crisis,” J.D. Vance, now vice-president of the United States, gives an evocative account of the relationship between his hometown and the heroic age of American industrial capitalism.¹ The beating heart of Middletown, Ohio, was its steel plant, then called Armco. Vance encapsulates the self-respect and sense of purpose that came from working there:

My grandfather loved the company and knew every make and model of car built from Armco steel. Even after most American car companies transitioned away from steel-bodied cars, Papaw would stop at used-car dealerships whenever he saw an old Ford or Chevy. “Armco made this steel,” he’d tell me. It was one of the few times that he ever betrayed a sense of genuine pride.

Yet the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy, coming to consciousness toward the end of the twentieth century, knows very well that the world of Papaw’s pride is gone. Indeed, Papaw himself knows it. He has no interest in seeing his grandson follow him into the steel plant:

“Your generation will make its living with their minds, not their hands,” he once told me. The only acceptable career at Armco was as an engineer, not as a laborer in the weld shop. A lot of other Middletown parents and grandparents must have felt similarly: To them, the American Dream required forward momentum. Manual labor was honorable work, but it was their generation’s work—we had to do something different. To move up was to move on.

What both Vance and his grandfather understood back then was the ruthlessly dynamic nature of capitalism. Vance was born into Ronald Reagan’s America, when neoliberalism—the belief that market forces must be liberated from regulation, high taxes, overactive government, and any real sense of social obligation—was reshaping the “commonsense” understanding of the economy and society. In the 1980s this ideology was pulling off the great trick of credibly presenting itself as a set not of ideas or value judgments but of undeniable facts that everyone had to accept. As Gary Gerstle writes in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022), “A key attribute of a political order is the ability of its ideologically dominant party to bend the opposition party to its will.” Neoliberalism became a political order in exactly that sense. Both Republicans and Democrats effectively told the industrial working class that its life of manual labor was over. Market forces had to be obeyed, and what they demanded was precisely what Papaw told J.D.: America had to do something different.

Papaw’s wisdom is most potently dramatized in a pivotal scene in the 1998 movie Primary Colors. The film, based on Joe Klein’s roman à clef, is a thinly disguised account of Bill Clinton’s dramatic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992. John Travolta’s Jack Stanton is an obvious proxy for Clinton in his Comeback Kid phase, when he overcame lurid revelations about his sexual promiscuity to open a path to the presidency.

The critical moment in the movie comes when the embattled Stanton addresses a meeting of workers in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It is based on a speech Clinton gave in the city in February 1992, but in the movie the location is the cavernous shop floor of a factory that has already closed. As Travolta speaks, the camera cuts away frequently to men in hard hats and women with hard faces, most of them white—anxious representatives of the declining American working class. The candidate lays on his good old boy southern charm. But then he becomes deeply serious:

I’m gonna do something really outrageous. I’m gonna tell the truth…. No politician can reopen this factory or bring back the shipyard jobs or make your union strong again. No politician can make it be the way it used to be, because we’re living in a new world now, a world without economic borders…. And in that world muscle jobs go where muscle labor is cheap—and that is not here. So if you wanna compete, you’re gonna have to exercise a different set of muscles—the one between your ears.

The workers are really listening to him now, precisely because he’s not just another politician telling them what he thinks they want to hear. He delivers both a warning and a promise:

Now this whole country’s gonna have to go back to school…. And I will make you this deal: I will work hard for you. I will wake up every morning thinking about you. I will fight and sweat and bleed to get the money to make education a lifetime thing in this country, to give you the support you need to move up. But you have got to do the heavy lifting your own selves.

The proletarians cheer Stanton to the very rafters of their hollowed-out industrial space.

The idea of “moving up” echoes from Primary Colors to Hillbilly Elegy. It is the program for those who toiled in Portsmouth’s shipyard and Middletown’s steelworks. But as Vance voices the message through Papaw, in order to move up, these communities must first move on. Moving on means getting over it—“it” being history, identity, belonging. It means swallowing their pride. What industrial workers have to get over is not just the sense of self-esteem that comes from looking at a great ship or a handsome car and knowing that you had a hand in making it. It is also faith in America’s innate superiority, both industrial and military, over the rest of the world.

In 1989—around the time that Donald Trump was railing against Japan for “taking advantage of the United States”—Middletown’s steel company was partially acquired by the Japanese industrial conglomerate Kawasaki and would soon be renamed Armco Kawasaki. As Vance records in Hillbilly Elegy, “Kawasaki was a Japanese company, and in a town full of World War II vets and their families, you’d have thought that General Tojo himself had decided to set up shop in southwest Ohio when the merger was announced.” In order to survive in the America Reagan had made, the workers of Middletown had to forget Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

It is striking that 1989 was also the year that Francis Fukuyama published, in the neoconservative journal The National Interest, one of the defining political essays of the period, entitled “The End of History?” He postulated:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

The end of history was not an abstract academic concept. It was happening in Middletown. And the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy is OK with it. He dismisses the anti-Japanese sentiment in the city as “mostly a bunch of noise.” He and Papaw are equally realistic about the necessity of adapting to the relentless “forward momentum” of capital:

The Kawasaki merger represented an inconvenient truth: Manufacturing in America was a tough business in the post-globalization world. If companies like Armco were going to survive, they would have to retool. Kawasaki gave Armco a chance, and Middletown’s flagship company probably would not have survived without it.

In Vance’s telling the industrial working class realizes that economic nationalism is a temptation it must resist. Globalization is an established fact. If the money and the technology are coming from a country that many of Middletown’s older residents fought a war against, such is life. Papaw, who used to threaten to disown his children if they bought a Japanese car, shrugs and says, “The Japanese are our friends now.” He presumably ignores the “bunch of noise” that came from the TV, where Trump, contemplating a run for the presidency in 1988, told Oprah Winfrey that the Japanese “think the United States is made up of a bunch of fools. They’re laughing at us.”

Here are not just two different stories but two conflicting ways of understanding American capitalism, rooted in sharply divergent conceptions of history. In the Vance version, time moves in a straight line: both the glory days of all-American steel and the bitter conflict with Japan are over. Move up and move on—if the Japanese know how to run industries more profitably, it is best to embrace their investment and learn from their know-how. Wallowing in a warm bath of past American greatness is a luxury neither workers nor bosses can afford.

In the Trump version, history is circular. The default condition of American capitalism is global superiority—if it has been lost, it can be restored by sheer political will. As the historian Jennifer M. Miller summarizes Trump’s position in an illuminating essay on his obsession with Japan:

If Japanese businesses were booming while American ones were declining, this was not because they designed superior products or because their workers had better education and training. The fault lay squarely with incompetent leadership; Japan’s success only could come from gaming the system. Rather than long-term investments in American education or a focus on growing economic inequality, the United States needed assertive leaders, who could confront Japan, return it to its “natural” place as the junior economic partner, and thus lead the United States to an economic revival.²

Neither of these stories has much to say about inequality, exploitation, or the rapacity that drives environmental destruction and climate breakdown. The Vance of 2016 could write affectingly about the symptoms of these diseases—poverty, drug dependency, alienation—but was no more interested than Trump was in their structural economic causes. Neither man presented any real critique of the Reaganite neoliberal revolution of the 1980s. Yet their visions of the nature of American capitalism itself were radically distinct.

Vance’s was orthodox conservatism: market forces are inexorable, and the wise course is to adapt to them as best one can. The burden of this adaptation must be borne by workers themselves. Just as Stanton/Clinton tells the proletarians that they must do the heavy lifting, Vance concludes in Hillbilly Elegy that the denizens of the Appalachian Rust Belt need to “stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.” Government is impotent and essentially irrelevant: “No politician can make it be the way it used to be.”

For Trump, on the other hand, everything was political. The Rust Belt could be resurrected, and the time could return when men like Papaw might look through the skin of a Ford or a Chevy and see the solid skeleton of Middletown steel inside—but only if America had a leader mighty enough to bring the Japanese and all the other foreigners to heel. What was not yet expressly articulated in this early Trump messaging was that while no democratic politician could return things to the way they used to be, an uninhibited strongman could do so by forcing foreigners to obey the natural law of American supremacy.

There was no doubt about which of these ways of thinking appealed most to the very rich—and it was not Trump’s. Depoliticizing economics in the way the Clinton character does in Primary Colors and Vance does in Hillbilly Elegy was a recipe for the accumulation of vast wealth by a tiny minority of Americans. If government is powerless to control the operation of market forces, its real job is to get out of their way. Most of the fruits of the new economy would naturally appear at the top of the tree.

Adjusted for inflation, the wealth held by families in the United States almost quadrupled between 1989 and 2022, but the share of it held by the bottom half of the population remained static at just 6 percent. Last year alone the nineteen richest households added $1 trillion to their accumulated assets, and the top 0.00001 percent now control a larger share of America’s wealth than ever before. The story Vance told in 2016 was a very good one for the richest Americans: it suited their purposes that the Middletown folk should understand capitalism as essentially impersonal and apolitical and accept that the best they could do was to “make things better” for themselves without blaming either government or “faceless companies” for their struggles.

Now, however, the vice-president has ditched, along with most of his other political positions, his moral tale of realistic adaptation to the relentless change inherent in capitalism. It has been replaced by the president’s fable of a politically driven restoration of the past. Trump’s economic agenda is doubly recursive: it repeats almost exactly his messaging from the 1980s, which in turn imagines a recovery of the heroic age of American industrial might. The end of history has ended. Trump has built an imaginary time machine in which “the way it used to be” is also the way it must and will be. And in this radical revision of the ideology of American capitalism, Fukuyama’s “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” is not merely obsolete; it must be confronted. Universalism, liberalism, and democracy are the enemies of American exceptionalism, of national greatness, and above all of the triumph of the will that must be embodied in the leader who declares, “I alone can fix it.”

As it happens, this replacement of one hegemonic idea with another is now playing out in a particularly ironic way in Middletown itself. In Hillbilly Elegy the steel plant is saved because Kawasaki comes in to “retool” its machinery. But more recently another kind of retooling was envisaged. Cleveland-Cliffs, the company that owns the plant now, declares on its website an intention to shift “away from manufacturing commodity steel in favor of higher-margin, specialty products.” To this end the Biden administration had allotted a $500 million grant to help the Middletown plant upgrade its aging blast furnaces, powered by coal, to ones fueled by hydrogen and electricity. But according to CNN the Trump–Vance administration—under the influence of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—intends to ax that grant.

This is OK because adaptation to economic change is out and political will is in. The future does not have to be planned for or funded because the past is returning. The Middletown plant does not need to shift to the production of high-value sustainable steel because Trump will use tariffs to ensure that it does not have to compete with cutting-edge global companies. King Coal will reign again, and the good old dirty jobs will be filled by men doing men’s work, all thanks to the great leader who made the foreigners bend the knee.

Leaving aside for the moment the viability of this new way of imagining American capitalism, we must ask why most of the oligarchy thought, when it swung behind Trump’s bid for reelection in 2024, that it could do without the old ideological model. The myth of a depoliticized and impersonal economy, in which essentially the same assumptions would apply whether the president was a Clinton or a Bush, served the superrich extremely well. Not only was wealth redistributed upward, but new forms of lucrative exploitation—the appropriation on a staggering scale of personal data for private profit—were allowed to flourish virtually unimpeded. Information technology, too, was construed as an unstoppable force to which everyone would have to adapt.

The problem for the very rich, however, is that as a political project neoliberalism hit the buffers in 2008. The great banking collapse exposed the idea that market forces operate outside politics as a convenient and no longer credible fiction. It became unavoidably obvious that the system of finance capitalism that replaced the old industrial complex is entirely dependent on public institutions. The moral basis for neoliberalism’s radically unequal distribution of the spoils of the new globalized economy had been a sense of rough justice: those who took the risks deserved the rewards. Yet it turned out that these were not the rules after all—the risks were socialized, but the rewards were privatized. For the rich, the bet had always been “heads I win, tails you lose.”

It also became obvious that “moving up,” the working class’s recompense for “moving on,” was not so easy. Both Vance’s Papaw and Clinton/Stanton had pledged that muscle jobs would be replaced by brain jobs. This was not just a political proposition; it was what most manual workers wanted for their children. But for far too many families it was a false promise. Democratic and Republican administrations did invest in training schemes, and many workers were indeed enabled to transition to new kinds of work. Overall, though, the social mobility that was supposed to be boosted in fact diminished. Ninety percent of the children of the New Deal order—those born in 1940—went on to earn more than their parents did. But the children of the neoliberal order—those born in 1980—had a fifty-fifty chance of earning less than their parents. Instead of receiving the lifelong reeducation that working families were promised, many of them were excluded by ever-rising college fees or cheated by scams like Trump University.

Yet as Gary Gerstle puts it, “A reigning political order does not release its grip easily…. Its decline is marked by contradiction, contestation, and even chaos.” During Trump’s first term those forces were at play almost as much within the regime as in American society as a whole. The old ideological order was still represented by figures like Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, who came from one of the great temples of neoliberal globalization, Goldman Sachs. Tax cuts for the rich and deregulation for businesses sustained a Reaganite economic agenda. But that old order could not fully impose itself—Cohn resigned in March 2018 when Trump moved to impose tariffs on foreign steel. Neither, however, could Trump himself, with his freedom of action limited by the Covid-19 pandemic, quite follow his own impulses. In the contest of economic ideologies, the result of Trump’s first term was inconclusive.

Where Trump had nonetheless succeeded, though, was in creating a mass base for an idea of capitalism that is entirely at odds with the neoliberal imagination. Against the insistence that no politician could reopen a Rust Belt factory, he established the notion that this was true only of the weak and foolish leaders that democracy had foisted on the American people. And against the image of inhuman market forces, anonymous as the weather, he made capitalism personal again.

Under neoliberalism, industrial workers had been told they must learn not to take capitalism personally. Successful adaptation required self-suppression. One must not allow oneself to feel humiliated when the vanquished of World War II turn up as the co-owners of the steel plant. One must relinquish the pride of having one’s own labor infused in powerful and beautiful machines. One must forget the generations of struggle embodied in the local histories of labor unions. One must, indeed, disremember the whole New Deal order and its transformative benefits for working people, their families, and their communities. Market forces cannot accommodate those emotions. This is tough, but it’s nothing personal.

Trump, however, personifies American capitalism. He performed in fourteen seasons of The Apprentice as a figure deeply embedded in its mindset—the magnate, the mogul, the tycoon, the titan of commerce. His act was, of course, more impersonation than personification. But this made it all the more effective: for mass consumption, an invented and exaggerated character sends a clearer signal than a real person.

No less importantly, Trump allows his fans to take possession (albeit in phony forms) of all the feelings that they were not supposed to express or indulge while their world was being taken from them. He presses hard on the raw nerve that Vance was so careful to avoid in Hillbilly Elegy: exploitation. In the neoliberal order, it was the vice that dared not speak its name. In his economic discourse, Trump speaks no other language.

But he also displaces exploitation from economic reality—instead of labor being taken advantage of by capital, America as a whole is continually abused and despoiled by foreign countries that laugh at the weakness of its leaders. Instead of moving on, as the steelworkers of Middletown had to do when they accepted their former Japanese enemies as saviors, there can be endless return to grievance, humiliation, and outrage. In place of forced amnesia, Trump offers a seductive dream time in which American history is sanitized into nostalgia. (The dark sides of the pre-Reagan industrial past are either suppressed—in the case of racism—or, in the case of its organized sexism, effectively celebrated as a golden age of manliness.)

For the superrich, this personalization of capitalism has two superficial upsides. One is that it seems to provide some kind of answer to the knotty question of what comes after the fall of the neoliberal order. The working class can be given the political agency it was previously denied; its pent-up emotions are unleashed and turned against all those who insist on a regulated and redistributive form of capitalism. The other is that it appears much easier to deal with political power when the complexity of democracy is reduced to a single individual.

These delusions are possible only because so many of the rich believe their own propaganda. As Gerstle puts it, “Cultivating ‘entrepreneurs’ of the self has long been a cardinal feature of the neoliberal order, and it shows no sign of waning” in the continuing half-life of that era. The tech oligarchs who facilitated Trump’s second coming know very well that he is a fake tycoon. But they can see and admire his astounding abilities as an entrepreneur of the self. He is not just an exploiter of social media technologies—he is one of the great exemplars of their governing ethic of endless self-invention.

The built-in flaw of this cult of the self-made man is that it leads those who have created vast fortunes to believe that they did it all themselves. They are subject to the same amnesia that neoliberalism demanded of the working class. They lose touch with all the things that made liberal democracy so essential to the development of capitalism: the rule of law; the relative stability that comes from allowing different sections of society to feel they have a share of power; public investment in education, health care, and science; the creation and maintenance of physical and digital infrastructures; predictable government informed by an expert bureaucracy. They build their own rockets and go into orbit far above the social and political conditions that have made their wealth possible.

In ditching democracy for autocracy, they also underestimated the autocrat. If you’ve created a trillion-dollar business, you might naturally think of Trump the serial bankrupt as merely a cartoon capitalist. You can recognize, and bow down to, Trump’s political genius while imagining that it is merely an exercise in branding, a big Trump sign placed over the door of a tower that’s actually owned by you and your confreres. Since everything else about Trump is an act, you can assume that he doesn’t really believe that he alone can will into existence a radically reshaped American capitalism. Surely he does not imagine that a single crude weapon—a blunderbuss of tariffs on all imports—will undo the effects of decades of economic globalization?

But he does. He has been absolutely consistent over nearly five decades in his conviction that American capitalism is an ideal system that will work perfectly once there is a leader strong enough to stop foreigners from rigging it. That leader, of course, is his indispensable self. America’s destiny will unfold from his instincts and impulses, so long as they are unchecked by democratic processes or the petty rationalism of evidence-based decision-making.

If capitalism is to be made personal, it would be a good idea to begin by understanding the person who is going to embody it. There is a reason Western capitalism ditched absolute monarchy: personal rule is rule by whim, prejudice, grudge, and tantrum. There are always opportunists who make money from chaos, and they will batten on the spoils of Trump’s bedlam. But capitalism as a system abhors uncertainty. Its beneficiaries are now ruefully remembering, far too late, that science, intellectual freedom, international cooperation, and social stability create wealth—and that giving untrammeled power to an autocrat bent on obliterating all of those things is a very efficient way to squander it.