Funny to see this in the NYT. A few short weeks ago, anyone saying something like this would be RACISTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT! Now, despite neolib protestations, it’s starting to permeate the discourse.
I’m not complaining. Of course I’m not; I’ve been saying this for decades. Any large country that outsources its entire manufacturing and productive capacity to another rival country or set of countries is being imprudent in the extreme. But the right people got rich and that was what mattered at the time.
Of course, the other important component that allowed this to occur is that much of academia was co-opted by neoliberal thought structures and ideology so any objection to this state of affairs became equated with racism, making objecting to the hollowing out of the nation nearly impossible.
That’s all starting to change. How much it will actually shift, I don’t know. I’m only moderately hopeful. But I do know that last year this wouldn’t have been published prominently in the NYT.