Trump Still Dreams of a 1950s-Era Economy

Have you ever had the wild thought that if you shut your eyes really tight and then opened them again, you’d wake up and find that you were a kid again, and that your whole adult life had been one long dream? No more backaches, no more mortgage payments, just Saturday morning cartoons and Mom and Dad waiting for you with a bowl of your favorite breakfast cereal.

This fantasy is kind of like MAGA. Short for “make America great again,” the slogan of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, that four-letter acronym has come to represent the idea that a strong leader, by force of will, can return the U.S. to the industrial economy and international dominance of the 1950s. All that Americans have to do is to elect the right man, and steel mills and coal mines will begin to dot the plains once again, good high-paying blue-collar jobs will return, and competitors in China will once more bow before the might of U.S. industry. It’s eerily reminiscent of the neoconservative fantasy that the Middle East could be transformed into a stable democracy by pure willpower.