On a somewhat recent episode of the Ezra Klein podcast, Klein was speaking to the economist Ken Rogoff about Trump's notoriously misguided tariff plans. Both of them were agreed that the tariffs were a disaster (or would be, if Trump didn't keep chickening out about actually following through on them). But Klein was trying to steel-man aspects of the administration's argument for the sake of the intellectual exercise.
At one point in doing so, he asked Rogoff if there was any truth to the idea that a strong U.S. dollar—the country's "exorbitant privilege"—was generally bad for U.S. manufacturing. Now, I thought from Macroeconomics 101 that the answer would be yes: all else being equal, a higher valuation for a country's currency will correlate to lower exports (because it becomes more valuable to hold assets from that country in currency rather than in physical goods).
But Rogoff does not give the Macro 101 answer. Instead, he dismissed the point as "ridiculous." Klein pressed him to explain why exactly it was so ridiculous. It took him a while to get a straight answer. Eventually, Rogoff replied that most of the manufacturing job loss in the U.S. over recent decades was due to automation, rather than global trade. Fair enough; I can believe that. I have no basis to dispute it. But before getting to that point, Rogoff started with a non sequitur.
He led by saying that we have to stop getting so nostalgic and weepy over manufacturing in the first place. Manufacturing jobs were never so great to begin with. He then made the comparison to farming. "Back in the 1970s," he said, "you had the same ads [...] but you saw them with farmers. They were constantly showing the farmers. We had to help the farmers. And you know what? Those jobs went away even though we’re the agricultural powerhouse in the world."
His point seemed to be that our society always goes through a moral panic about the loss of jobs in certain industries—and that we are simply having the same freak-out about manufacturing now that people did in the 1970s about agriculture. In both cases, however—he argues—the job loss was ultimately due to impersonal forces of technological change and innovation. Automation made it less cost-effective to employ large numbers of people in both sectors.
A subtler implication of his point, though, was perhaps that we shouldn't wax nostalgic about these industries at all. We went through a natural process of economic change with respect to agriculture. A lot of people lost their jobs—but ultimately people found new employment and society reached some sort of fresh equilibrium. We had the panic in the 1970s about lost farm jobs, but look at us now—the argument seems to be saying—we got through the crisis. We all turned out fine.
But... did we? Few of us spend a lot of time these days obsessing over lost farm employment. Maybe very few of us would choose to work on a family farm if we had the option. But a 1998 essay by Gore Vidal suggests that the evisceration of farm employment may have impacted the trajectory of our politics more fundamentally than we tend to think. It's possible that the roots of our present political crisis lie as much in the devastation of farm country a few decades ago as in lost factory jobs in the rust belt.
I approached Vidal's 2002 essay collection, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, with some trepidation. I thought that Vidal (who coded as a liberal during the Bush era) might have aged poorly by contemporary standards. After all, some of his hobbyhorses which seemed "Left" in 2002—isolationism, the specter of American imperial overreach, an aversion to globalization, an at-times conspiratorial view of federal agencies, etc.—are now themes on the MAGA nativist right, these days, as much as on the far left.
But I found that Vidal mostly comes across—even from the perspective of 2025—mostly just as a sincere civil libertarian. My worst fears were not sustained: there seems zero chance that Vidal—had he lived—would have evolved into a Trump supporting "America Firster." Why do I say that? Mostly because he was principled and consistent in his skepticism toward federal power: so it's hard to believe he would be silent now, as a Trump presidency thrashes the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Indeed, Vidal's warnings about Clinton- and Bush-era authoritarianism seem ominously prescient—now that Trump is invoking wartime powers to send immigrants to forever prisons, and to deploy the U.S. military against protesters. Vidal speaks of the "knockout blow to our vanishing liberties" that Clinton and Bush delivered between them: "special powers to wiretap without judicial order; to deport lawful permanent residents, visitors, and undocumented immigrants without due process, and so on."
Those are not the words of someone who would be able to bring themselves to cast a ballot for Trump's brand of authoritarianism.
To be sure, there are some worrying signs in the book. As Vidal's prison correspondence with Timothy McVeigh deepens, he appears at times to blur the line between merely principled opposition to the death penalty and actual sympathy with McVeigh's aims.
The above-mentioned 1998 essay, "Shredding the Bill of Rights" (which first brought Vidal to McVeigh's attention) stands up very well in hindsight. Vidal here doesn't read as a sympathizer with far-right "militia" or survivalist movements. Indeed, he condemns them as crackpots and cultists. But he nonetheless fiercely condemns the federal government for its abuses of power and extrajudicial killings in the incidents at Ruby Ridge and Waco—and not unjustly so.
In doing so, Vidal doesn't come across as trying to defend or support the worldviews of the Waco cultists or the survivalist types in the wilds of Idaho—he is merely a principled civil libertarian, who is as offended when the federal government violates the rights of people he disagrees with as otherwise. We know this because, in the same essay, he also writes at length in condemnation of police violence, brutality, and violations of the Bill of Rights against other groups of people as well.
In the latter essays in the collection, as Vidal drew closer to McVeigh through their prison correspondence, he starts to go a bit more off the rails. His citations in the text suggest that Vidal's reading matter at the turn of the millennium had taken an increasingly conspiratorial and apocalyptic turn—he was no longer just absorbing sociological studies that tried to explain the right-wing militia movements—but had actually started to internalize some of the movement's own written output.
The 1998 "Shredding the Bill of Rights" essay, though, is—as I say—admirably free of these kookier influences. There, he was not suggesting that the militia movement was actually right in their diagnosis of the source of contemporary ills; let alone in their apocalyptic conspiracism. But he does suggest that the omnidirectional rage of these movements had its source in at least one legitimate grievance: the depopulation and consolidation of American farm country in the heartland.
Here, Vidal cites another writer named Joel Dyer for the thesis that the American heartland had given birth to so many bizarre cults and paramilitaries in the '90s because their previous way of life was being destroyed. "[A] handful of agro-conglomerates are working to drive America's remaining small farmers off their land," through under-paying them for crops and forcing them to take on unsustainable levels of debt—eventually leading to forced sales enabling consolidation of their land.
"So towns and villages continue to decay [...] and the dispossessed rural population despairs and rages," writes Vidal. One is reminded of Oliver Goldsmith's depiction of the "Deserted Village"—"ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey/ where wealth accumulates and men decay." His eighteenth century villages, after all, were early victims of enclosure and agricultural consolidation, by which the previous population of rural Britain had been turned into dispossessed proletarians.
Vidal suggests the same dynamic may have unfolded in the American heartland in the second half of the twentieth century. And even if the people affected by these changes misdirected their outrage—funneling it into bizarre racist conspiracy theories and millenarian fantasies—they weren't wrong to think they were the victims of social injustice. "Conspiracy theories now blossom in the wilderness," writes Vidal, "[...] and those in thrall to them are mocked invariably... by the actual conspirators."
It is hard not to think of Ken Rogoff at this point—mocking the idea of worrying about farmers losing their jobs as "ridiculous." "They were constantly showing the farmers. We had to help the farmers," Rogoff says, sarcastically. But maybe it wasn't so ridiculous for people to worry about the farmers. Maybe we should have heeded the warnings and paid attention to the TV ads. Maybe, that is, it would have saved us from our present political nightmare.
After all, if we are looking for the homegrown roots of the kind of maniacal politics of extremism, racism, nativism, and conspiracism that have now twice returned Donald Trump to the White House—despite his obvious demagoguery, his appeals to xenophobia, and his relentless lying and resort to easily-debunked conspiracy theories—it is not absurd to look here: to the rural rage sparked by agricultural consolidation, which Vidal links to mid-90s right-wing terrorism (Oklahoma City, e.g.).
Maybe the dispossession of small family farmers through industrial consolidation and automation was at some point inevitable; but certainly the victims of the process were not being irrational to rail against it. What are people supposed to do, when they are cast out of land, home, and work? One is reminded of Carlyle's passage about the nineteenth century proletariat: he imagined them asking: Are we supposed merely "in a composed manner [to] perish of starvation? What is it you expect of us?"
And it may be true that eventually those lost family farm jobs were replaced by other forms of employment and a new economic equilibrium—but here, one is reminded of the words of a certain Serbian diplomat quoted by E.H. Carr on the topic of free trade: "The old 'things-will-right-themselves' school of economists argued that if nothing were done [...] economic equilibrium would come about of its own accord. That is probably true (I do not propose to discuss the point). But how would that equilibrium come about? At the expense of the weakest."
Since our society keeps choosing that path—to opt for technological change, industrial combination, and the growth of monopolies (in spite of antitrust laws that were supposed to prevent exactly that outcome)—and always at the expense of the weakest—we should perhaps not be surprised that those weakest sometimes choose not to simply go quietly into that good night. Sometimes, they do not merely let themselves "in a composed manner perish of starvation," as Carlyle put it.
Sometimes, that is, they rage against the dying of the light. We reap as we sow—and here, we have inherited a "harvest of rage," as the writer Vidal quotes—Joel Dyer—put it. Here are perhaps the roots of the conspiracist rage that has distorted our national politics now for decades. As Heine wrote of the dispossessed Silesian weavers—displaced from their work by the same forces of automation and mechanization two centuries ago—
“A curse on the King of the wealthy, whom often
“Our misery vainly attempted to soften;
“Who takes away e'en the last penny we've got,
“And lets us like dogs in the highway be shot,—
“We're weaving, we're weaving! (Bowring trans.)
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