What he’s been doing is only good for his grift game, not the USA.
If you want to bring manufacturing home, you frame a 5-10 year progressive tariff plan with tax incentives, financing, and grants to help build the infrastructure to progressively fill the demand as the tariffs roll in. Commerce thrives in stable environments with predictable changes, not in chaos and broken promises.
I moved ops to a Caribbean nation where we can get parts, (it’s simply not possible to source many parts and services within the USA anymore without paying 2-3x in fees or enduring weeks to months of delays in customs) and iterate at a competitive speed.
R&D in the USA went from riding a sport bike to swimming in molasses with crocodiles basically overnight, way too unpredictable to even sign contracts with suppliers, with random tariffs creating 2x cost uncertainty.
You simply cannot plan or make long term contracts when the uncertainty is so high with no predictable pattern. Ironically, we also cannot sign even with US suppliers, because they don’t know if they will have ongoing tariffs to protect buildout or if they will evaporate, so they also cannot risk expanding production.
It’s a total shitshow and the only reason it exists is to power the grift train. If a company is big enough, some shady deal goes down and suddenly they magically qualify under de minimus or some other supposedly dead exemption. I would not be surprised to see that you could correlate these exemptions with purchases of shitcoicins or similar shady wanker-works. The trade shenanigans do nothing to help US businesses, and drive innovation out of the USA like rats off a sinking ship.
Our system progresses in two year increments, by design.
So I ask again, what would you propose?
I'm a big fan of the civil rights movement, but a lot of this kind of stuff like your comment that I see strikes me as nostalgia that doesn't seem to understand what made that movement effective. It was effective because they thought, concretely, about their goals and about what concrete steps they could take that they thought would make progress toward those goals. That concreteness always seems (to me) to be lost in these contemporary discussions, replaced with "do something" and sloganeering.
Another difference, in my view, is that John Lewis was trying to figure out how to change a system in which there was no hope that the next election, or the one after that, or the one after that, ad infinitum, would itself affect the desired change, because both parties were opposed to the policy he desired. In my view, that's not the current situation. This thread started out being about the Trump administration's tariff policy (which I think is awful and stupid). But the next Congress, which will be seated quite soon - certainly much sooner than any kind of civil disobedience campaign would be able to bear fruit - can write laws that change that policy. And the more people are mad about the current policy, and the more they vote for the opposing party because they are mad about the status quo, the more likely that new Congress is to write those new laws.
There are times when it makes sense to lose faith in normal electoral politics, but in my view, the eve of an election where the incumbent powers are about to get routed is a weird time to suggest it.
If even 50% of people just stopped going to work and spending money, things would change veeeery quickly.
A few weeks of inconvenience for decades of a better future? Sign me up.
It brings up the 1940s struggles of labor, industry, and .gov, and labor lost and had its back broken. Could labor outmaneuver industry and the state today if we ran it back?
Not yet. But it’s coming.
I do appreciate the concrete suggestion rather than the vague "do something", but another attribute of the civil rights movement was that their goals were modest and their "good trouble" targeted at achieving those goals were things they could actually organize. I'm sure John Lewis would have always loved there to be a general strike to achieve his desired policy, but he and his movement understood what they could and couldn't actually organize.
But the internet makes organizing a general strike exponentially easier than it was in the past.
If you don’t like the general strike idea, what is your suggestion?
I think you’ll need to revisit this in a few months when he finds a way to make the election ineffective, and/or just keeps doing what he’s doing regardless.
And again in 2029 when he doesn’t leave the White House.
My suggestion is to vote for and otherwise help the opposition win a Senate majority.
If the current administration finds a way to steal or override the election, I will be willing to entertain different ideas. I was worried this might be the reality, but now I think the administration is way too unpopular and discredited to pull anything off. So now I think it's just going to be like the last two years of W. Bush. Just incredibly sad and embarrassing with everyone jockeying for control over what comes next.