Like Clockwork: “Bring the Jobs Back to America”
The perfidiousness of it all. The political deceit at the core of US nostalgia for late industrial capitalism.
You can count on it. Every two years, in the buildup to elections in the United States, you can be sure of it. It matters not that the cry seems ever more plaintive. Or that it grows, simultaneously, ever more muffled and irrepressible with every election cycle. Or that it appears ever more duplicitous. Or that it reeks of desperation. Or that it is grows ever more anachronistic. It persists. Even if they code their promises differently—and even that it is a claim that ranks as rhetorically dubious—both major US political parties subscribe to the logic of economic return. That is, under this Democratic administration or that Republican one, manufacturing jobs will, through some miracle, return to America. America, a country that “used to make things,” will revitalize its manufacturing base.
Neither political party ever details how this manufacturing base will be restored. No matter; it is a promise that must be made. Even as everyone knows it cannot be kept. This economic appeal is addressed to that mythical figure: the middle-class, white, heteronormative blue-collar worker, that salt-of-the-earth figure, all over the country, but is especially aimed at the Midwest. A Midwest that is by no means geographically (geopolitically) limited to the heartland states—of which Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan can be said to constitute the core. In truth, however, this fictitious Midwest can begin much further east. Say, from old mill towns in Rhode Island or western Massachusetts, running through now-crumbling small to mid-size cities in upstate New York—Utica, Rochester, Buffalo1—to Erie, Pennsylvania, and relentlessly on to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Gary, with the economic rot reaching its low point in Detroit. Somehow it is always Detroit that is held up as the archetype of industrial decay. Detroit, home of the US auto industry, Ford, General Motors, is the face of industrial devastation. Detroit, where automation made the assembly line obsolete. Detroit, bested in the 1970s by a Japanese car industry that was leaner, more efficient (making smaller cars as opposed to US gas guzzlers), and technologically forward looking.
The United States’ old industrial base, now perceived, correctly, as ravaged by global capital’s relentless march away from manufacturing and in the direction of a technological revolution, is relentless in its pursuit of ever greater efficiency, which has the commensurate effect of requiring increasingly less labor and, it is presumed, a set of skills vastly different from that which allowed US industry to flourish after World War II. The much lamented “boom years” ended somewhere in the early 1970s, if the neoliberal account of postindustrialism’s rise is to be believed. The OPEC oil crisis of 1972 figures prominently in this narrative of US industrial decline.
From the 1970s on, the effects of deindustrialization have provided rhetorical fodder for the campaign trail. Until 2016, this discourse appeared to have peaked some twenty years earlier, with the election of Bill Clinton. A cruel irony, of course, because it was this self-same Clinton who, despite having sung the praises of working stiffs on the campaign trail, oversaw the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA—integrating the economies of Canada, Mexico, and the United States) on January 1, 1994, thereby further depleting an already emaciated industrial base as the remaining manufacturing jobs moved south. With an unseemly haste. In the cause of lower labor costs.2
“The American Worker” and Grievance
The figure of “The American Worker,” betrayed by politicians in the pockets of a big capital committed to a service-industry economic model (among which financial services rank first), has endured, is lamented as that American left behind by technological advances. The superannuation by finance capital of an America that makes things is the very issue dramatized, as a later section of this essay shows, by the 1987 movie Wall Street, where it is cast as a benign generational tussle. The American whose right to a decent-paying job is every day being denied by the “forces of globalization” (a catchall phrase if there ever was one), the laborer who is now being promised that, yes, manufacturing jobs will be “brought back.”
A manufacturing pipe dream. Of course.
Except it is a pipe dream that has, since 2016, assumed a nightmarish visage.
With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the fantasy of “bringing jobs back” has hardened into a toxic political substance, with frightening consequences for the American body politic. That mythical “blue-collar guy” is now no longer confined to the Rust Belt. (As we have just pointed out, deindustrialization was a national—indeed, a global—rather than a local, “Midwestern” phenomenon.) That mythical figure has metastasized. This figure, now protean in profile, is no longer only based in class. It includes every aggrieved white person in America, from low-wage workers to elected officials (in various states across the country), from those sworn to uphold the law (police officers chief among them) to emergency workers, from small business owners to members of the professional class.
The white aggrieved presents itself as “anti-elite” even as it takes its cues, entirely without irony, from a nonconsecutive second-term president who wouldn’t know a hammer from a power drill and who has a long history of stiffing contractors. Among those venerated self-same working men and women (although in Trump’s discourse misogyny rules) are, we presume, some who vote for him in significant numbers.
At its core, as currently constituted, is racial animus. An animus augmented and intensified by xenophobia. This animus is easily mobilized because are “coastal elites” held responsible for a deindustrialization that is now no longer regional but racial. (According to this logic, there are no postindustrial capitalists who are truly Midwestern in disposition. In other words, the Koch brothers [Wichita, Kansas], Warren Buffett [Omaha, Nebraska], and their like are, in truth, East Coasters in economic practice—the commitment to profit—even as they retain, somewhere in their gold-plated bosom, in their hearts the unimpugnable values of the heartland.) It is white men, angry white men: white men aggrieved by demographic shifts that threaten their political dominance; angry white men bitter at the rising educational levels and economic power of women, especially highly educated and visible women (making it all too easy to pillory a figure such as Hillary Clinton), to say nothing of women of color; angry white men now, in short, lashing out at an America no longer centered around their economic profile—that American white man presumed to be non–college educated, more rural than suburban, more nominally Christian (of the hold-the-Bible upside down variety), and Second Amendment–oriented than polyglot, racially diverse, urban America; provincial, not global, in outlook.
In short, post-2016 postindustrial America has assumed the face of a white male grievance even as it cannot be restricted to white men. (I have written about how white male grievance is constitutive of and has persisted throughout US history elsewhere. A history of grievance that begins with the Declaration of Independence and has persisted through the Civil War, the violent undoing of the Reconstruction project, the struggle for Civil Rights, and so on, culminating in the event of January 6, 2021.)3 These angry white men are its violent core, its rampaging foot soldiers, its chief political constituency. A constituency capable of a violence that has already reached insurrectionary proportions. At least once—January 6—with more such manifestations, it would seem, in the offing. Imminently.
Pretty Woman
Therefore, while this essay takes as its focus the 1990 movie, Pretty Woman, it belongs very much to the zeitgeist of our moment. Through this movie, The Prettiest Woman: Nostalgia for Late Industrial Capitalism offers a critique of the ways US popular culture grapples with, glamorously, the nostalgia for a mode of life sustained by industrial capitalism that is on its last legs. Maybe even has one foot in the grave already. And yet it persists, this nostalgia—this nostalgia that seems ever more mobilizable. In this way, as much as The Prettiest Woman speaks to an earlier postindustrial conjuncture, what is ideologically at stake in this essay remains pertinent.
The ways in which the1990 movie takes up nostalgia for late industrial capitalism is not, of course, of a complete piece with our contemporary. In fact, we could justifiably claim, in hindsight, that the movie’s rendering of nostalgia is anachronistic, and in that way a sharp reminder of how the public debate around—and invocation of—that nostalgia has shifted. To address what subtends the movie’s nostalgia, this essay shifts registers in the second half. While a Marxist (and cultural Marxist) critique is the dominant thread in the opening half, the second half is inflected by that brand of Lacanian thought practiced by Slavoj Žižek. It is not so much that the historico-materialist is relegated as it is supplemented—sublated, even; Aufhebung—by the psychoanalytic so that the “domestic” elements at work in Pretty Woman, the patronymic family drama that operates in a lower frequency, can be thought in its specificity.
However, this second line of critique in no way detracts from a salient recognition. More than thirty years after Hollywood gave us Pretty Woman, America’s political nostalgia for late industrial capitalism remains stronger than ever. And, more virulent than it has ever been. Thought against the history that is our history of the present, The Prettiest Woman is a reminder most untimely—in Friedrich Nietzsche’s sense—of how, when the terms of a longstanding debate change, they rarely, if ever, do so for the better. (That is, if they can even be said to change at all.)
So conceived, The Prettiest Woman offers itself as a first (which is never a first) articulation of American nostalgia for late industrial capitalism. As is the case with all first articulations, it is the erasures that mark—and mar—them. Erasures, however, that must be understood as not constitutive philosophical deficiencies but as the fecund ground that is a historical moment’s unthought. In this way, it is both that which Pretty Woman addresses—the ways in which nostalgia manifests itself in one moment—and that which lies beyond (but not outside) its historical purview that haunts our thinking of capitalism.
As such, The Prettiest Woman is a thinking of the nostalgia for late industrial capitalism that is, in and of itself, by itself, because of itself, at once provocative and constitutively insufficient. It might very well be that the salient feature of this essay is that, in turning its focus to an earlier historical moment, it compels us to attend ever more urgently to our contemporary and, in so doing, to sift through the detritus that is the remains of late industrial capitalism. The Prettiest Woman, then, as that thinking of the nostalgia for late industrial capitalism circa 1990 that stands as a first tracing through what remains, almost against expectation, of late industrial capitalism. As much as anything, this essay may very well have the unintended effect of making us nostalgic for an earlier, prettier, mode (and moment) of nostalgia. It is an accounting of what has been lost, because we remain, as it seems we always have been, in the thrall of capitalism.
Who knows where we will be two years from now? What will we be nostalgic for then? What kind of dramas about the conjuncture of family dysfunction and the machinations of capital, late industrial and technologically advanced, will preoccupy us then?
Notes
1. Rochester and Buffalo, I should note, have both undertaken urban renewal projects, projects that have, to this point, been more successful in some areas than others. The waterfront in Buffalo, for example, has revitalized parts of the city’s downtown. Areas of urban blight remain visible in Rochester.
2. It is a refrain that echoes right into our moment, that it is still possible to “Make things in America.” All US politicians, it would seem, are intent on forgetting that both parties signed on to the NAFTA agreement, creating a trade zone that extends the length of the continent and then some, no matter that the free-trade agreement was spearheaded by a Democratic president (Bill Clinton), was opposed by labor unions, but nonetheless won majority support in its passage through Congress.
3. See Grant Farred, Grievance: Aphorisms, Fragments (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2024).