“We let capitalism run amok.
It corrupted our news…business went overseas
to take advantage of slave labor.
Cost of living is unaffordable.
Fascism was almost inevitable.”
I posted this query to my facebook friends out of pure frustration.
My fb friends, apparently, are not given to obscenities, rude comments or inflammatory rhetoric. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the most deeply thought out answer came from Usedmedia artist/cartoonist Jimmy Purcell.
It’s a lot to unpack from this summary of recent history…and it goes further back than the presidential election of 2024.
When did business go overseas to use cheap labor? Think back to the free trade impulse that dominated American politics since the end of World War II, (Yes, I am going back that far…and even farther to figure out what happened in 2024.)
The 20th century exploded with two wars that followed uncontrollable boom and bust economies. Unemployment was high, bread lines proliferated, encampments of unemployed Americans became political statements in the l930s. After the Stock Market Crash in l929, the US turned to tariffs to protect the American economy. But again, reading history, these high tariffs did nothing to ease the decade long Great Depression that followed. In fact, some argue that the high (40 to 60%) tariffs contributed to the length of the Depression.*
After world war II ended, economists and politicians turned in a different direction. The way to prevent the disasters of the first half of the 20th century would be through free trade, making trade easier between countries of the world and bringing back stability (they thought). In the immediate postwar years, international efforts to stimulate trade resulted in the creation of the World Trade Organization and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (WHO and GATT.)
The most recent iteration of free trade came in l993 when NAFTA (North American Free Trade association) was enacted facilitating trade between the United States, Canada and Mexico.
That is when all the jobs were supposedly lost, nearly 700,000 in manufacturing and some 4 million overall. These jobs were replaced by cheaper labor in countries like Mexico, where American corporations flew to take advantage of lower wages.
So why is fascism almost inevitable? Looking back again, fascism in Germany developed before World War II because of three things: economic problems, national humiliation and weak democratic institutions.
Today in the United States, we looking at: economic anxiety for many Americans and the difficulties our democratic institutions have in coming to grips with this. In fact, I would argue we haven’t understood how much of the American population is struggling economically. (We seem to know that maybe 30% of American families live paycheck to paycheck and more than 10% overall don’t feel they are doing well economically.) I am not sure what happened to the Americans who lost their manufacturing jobs. Did they recover from the trauma and did they recover financially? No none seems to have a reasonable course of action.
Is this what we have done to produce this chaos in 2025? Or not done? We are polarized and paralyzed. How could we let this happen?
*because most other countries retaliated, world trade collapsed, the world entered into economic depression.*