Make America Great Again?

Our new president, Donald Trump, when he isn't tweeting about vote fraud or signing executive orders to refuse visas to people from terrorist state, is telling us he will "Make America Great Again". Like most politicians he is throwing out a phrase that acts like an ink blot test and allows his followers to project their own definition of "great" so that he doesn't have to. Setting aside whether America is no longer great, and when in its history America might have been greater than now, he hasn't specified what he means by that phrase, or when America was so greater than it is right now, much less how he means to make it great again.

So let's try to figure this out for him. Mr. Trump was born on June 14, 1946, making him 70 years old. I suppose he might have been brought up with stories of World War II as the last time people were united in America and fighting together to defeat the threats of Nazi Germany and Japan in what author Studs Terkel called "The Good War". And in many ways, World War II and the twenty years after were very good years for America. Prior to WW II, America was fighting the Great Depression, and times were exceedingly tough for most. If nothing else, WW II brought much greater prosperity for Americans, along with the tears of fighting a cataclysmic world war. But by and large, America avoided most of the destruction, and the post war years brought twenty years of economic growth and full employment, thanks to the destruction of almost all of our competitors productive capacity.

How might we return to that economic prosperity?

Unfortunately, you can't run history backwards, and you can't undo the changes of technology.

I'm going to use just one example to prove my point.

During World War II, the U.S. Navy needed ships. Lots of ships. Including lots of aircraft carriers. Henry Kaiser was one American that fought the war through technology, by brining new methods of shipbuilding to building U.S. Navy ships. He build escort carriers, "baby flat tops", in a new shipyard in Vancouver WA at Ryan Point. Here's a photo of the builder's ways, with a batch of carriers on the ways:

There are twelve CVE's on the ways, in various states of completion. Here's another shot, with the builders ways in the foreground and the fitting out dock towards the top (pardon the stock photo):

Looking at both these shots, it's easy to see the highway and rail line that brought workers and parts to the shipyard, the buildings between the highway and the ways that housed the managers and fabrication shops, the piles of materials waiting to be added to the ships, and finally the ways, where the carriers are being built. Kaiser's yard is all the more fantastic when you learn that this yard alone produced 50 escort carriers in one year, between July 8, 1943 and July 8, 1944.

This shipyard produced more escort carriers than any other yard in America, and faster to boot. His other yards were famous for producing more Liberty ships faster than any other yard.

And here's the Kaiser shipyard today:

Same highway and rail line, towards the top. Along the river's edge, to the right of Ryan Point, you can see the remains of the builders ways extending into the Columbia River. To the left of Ryan Point, the fitting out dock is no longer a dock, just a river bank. The buildings of the old shipyard have been acquired and made into new businesses, including Thompson Metal Fab, Greenberry Industrial, Robinson CH, Watson & Shepard Trucking, Lincoln Electric, etc. Here's the link to Google Maps. In a way, it's great to see that the remains of the Kaiser shipyard have been recycled for use.

But if the purpose (and the need) is to Make America Great, and one area that America is no longer a leader is in shipbuilding, then returning this one time leading shipyard to its former glory days is going to take lots and lots of time, money, and effort. In fact, I venture that it will not be done. There is one shipyard in America today that produces aircraft carriers. Here it is:

That's Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News VA. It's huge, and has four building ways and two heavy lift cranes, necessary for lifting modules when building major size ships like aircraft carriers. Here's a zoom in on just one of those ways:

That's one of the U.S. Navy's Nimitz-class carriers undergoing a Service Life Extension Plan upgrade, or SLEP. This is the only ship yard that can build a nuclear powered aircraft carrier.

Here's my point: America changes every day. Technology changes, mostly for the better. American's have, over the years, mostly changed to fit the times. Before we start rolling back progress, undoing the changes we have already made in search of past greater, more glorious times, shouldn't we figure out what it is we are seeking? What was glorious about the past? Is it still applicable? Achievable?

And ask ourselves if we wouldn't be better served by working to adapt to the present? Maybe retrain those workers who have been harmed by the change? Maybe put more dollars into researching our future?

The hallmark of conservatism is resisting change and trying to keep things constant or returning to a better previous time. I find our current president and his new cabinet to be little better than the radical islamists they are always disparaging, in that ISIS too wants to return to a greater past (just a little further back, say the 1500's). Mr. Trump and friends seem to want to roll back social change, economic change, modern trade policy. The problem isn't the trade policies. American businesses did well with modern trade. The problem is that American businesses and American government did nothing to protect the American workers who were harmed by the trade.

Interestingly, this was all predicted back in 1971 by one of President Nixon's economic policy advisors Peter Peterson. Edward Alden covered this well in Failure to Adjust. Peterson was asked to predict the effects of taking the US off the gold standard, the adoption of floating currencies, the increase of exports, and the rise of competition from foreign companies. The economic crisis of 1970's was due to changes in trade and the inability of America to recognize the changes and adapt to them. "If all countries specialize in producing those things which they are best at producing, then the world's wealth will be maximized by the international specialization of labor which results". The United States refused to refrain from protecting industries that made no sense to protect. The United States failed to keep faith with the displaced Americans by retraining them. When states compete and businesses move from state to state, workers can move to follow. When businesses move globally, Americans can't follow. In these cases, American business and government should retrain rather than casting aside those workers.

We are still making the same mistakes today. Simply put, if our world will be destroyed by climate change, we can't burn coal, but we also owe our coal miners retraining and/or assistance in moving. Every other industrialized country provides assistance to its workers. Only the U.S. takes its workers taxes and then casts them aside.

Mr. Trump and the conservative Republicans are likely to get a different America than what they seek. I believe that they will ultimately reveal themselves to want a return to the gilded age of the 1890's and 1920's and will again attempt to benefit the 1%. This time, instead of an Occupy Wall Street, they will get a real revolution. When more and more people see the tax cuts for the rich return while their real needs for jobs and income and healthcare are not met, the tree of liberty will again be watered with blood.