President Trump’s campaign to bring back serious manufacturing – light, heavy and in-between – has never been popular with the Left. I wonder why.
I am not of the Left, myself, so I can’t be totally sure of their reasons, but perhaps I can make some educated guesses.
Factories traditionally were dirty places, with grease and dust and grime. Workers came home after a hard day on the assembly line needing both a long shower and a clean set of clothes. Maybe that’s why the Left doesn’t like them.
Factories traditionally were polluters, sending black smoke and soot into the air from their furnaces and power sources, or disposing of toxic pollutants into local rivers or lakes. The Left might fear seeing such smoke in the air once again, or seeing such detritus float downriver once again. That could be a good reason to dislike them.
And of course factories didn’t just hire the right people, the good people, the well-bred. The right people had desks in the office building, of course, but the plant had people who weren’t educated, people who might have dropped out of school in junior high, if they’d ever been to school at all. You couldn’t have a conversation with such people about the theatre, or about high literature, or about the dialectic; who’d want to talk to such coarse people? Factories attract them. As if our cities needed more such rubes.
Now, you and I know that the above isn’t the reality of the present; it’s an exaggerated stereotype of the late 19th century. But that is where the Left’s mind is permanently stuck, in the revolutionary mentality of Marx and Engels. For them it is always the era of sweatshops, and pollution, and the unwashed masses who need to be saved from a cruel life of hard work, and introduced to the rewards of the union boss and the social worker.
We whose eyes are open know that today’s factories bear little similarity to the dangerous halls of misery of the early industrial era. Today’s factories have automation to handle repetitive work; they have safety engineers to ensure that training and safety protocols are in place at every machine and at every manufacturing cell. Today’s factories have Environmental Health and Safety departments to ensure that the SDS sheets are up to date, that the wash station in the bathroom has the necessary soaps and cleansers for whatever the staff may be dealing with there.
Today’s factories have filtration systems integrated into their drain, their windows, their chimneys. Most factories today put back the air and water so effectively filtered that it’s cleaner going out than it was when it came in.
But the real difference that factories provide is with the people, and that’s why it’s so telling that the Left doesn’t support reindustrialization.
As America has gradually moved much of our manufacturing abroad over these recent decades, becoming more the much vaunted “service economy” than a manufacturing one, what has happened to the nature of the workplace?
We still buy and sell goods. These products are still made – somewhere – sometimes by American companies. So what changes?
If an American company outsources much or most, or even all, of its production to, say, the People’s Republic of China, there are still jobs here, aren’t there? An accounting department, a sales department, a shipping department. Law and marketing are certainly still represented, and engineering of course. Upper management thinks it will do just fine.
But the actual work – done by the actual workers – to make each piece and assemble each finished good, now takes place in China. So the hundreds, or even thousands, of jobs in production have now disappeared from the United States and reappeared in China.
That sounds fine, for those activists and politicians who like and respect the white collar, but dislike and disrespect the blue.
But it’s not fine for the American workers – or would-be workers – who now have no job at all because the great “service economy” movement has moved their factory jobs to China.
Who’s going to benefit, and who’s going to be hurt, whenever this migration of jobs to China occurs? The Chinese benefit, of course – their government, their connected business class, their almost-slave laborers, and of course sometimes their literal slave labor. They get these jobs.
The American office worker might not think he’s being hurt, but the American factory worker certainly knows it hurts him – and there are a lot of Americans who would like to have those factory jobs that we’ve been shipping away.
The thing about it is, a factory job isn’t just a static job on an assembly line. It’s a ticket to entry; it’s an employee’s way of breaking into a business world that’s otherwise closed to him, and beginning a career that needs, more than anything else, that one single open door.
People who come from a decent school district, who have parents who can send them to college, have an entry into the office world of the service economy. The accounting degree or engineering degree, the MBA or law degree, can start a person on a career path that climbs from department to department, from company to company, rising to a decent managerial salary, maybe to an upper level management salary, perhaps even to entrepreneurship, consultancy, or corporate leadership bringing wealth and prestige.
But what of the people who don’t come from a decent school district, or who can’t afford to go to college? Without these launching pads, it’s a great deal harder to start on any career path, unless there’s a factory with a Help Wanted sign.
The small to mid-sized factory that employs hundreds of people on assembly lines provides that launching pad. Once you have that first job, you have the opportunity to begin to shine in some way, and then to take advantage of plentiful opportunities to better yourself.
The factory worker who distinguishes himself in one way or another will attract the attention of management, and be encouraged to go back and finish high school or get that GED, or to go to college (community college is usually almost free, and employers often have programs to cover much of the cost).
The factory job gives each employee a chance to take classes in engineering and then transfer to quality or R&D or product engineering. Or accounting, and transfer into finance or purchasing. Or software engineering, and transfer into the I.T. department. Or business management, and transfer into customer service or sales.
And what if the person isn’t interested in moving over to the office? There’s advancement right in the plant, too. The person on the line can become a team lead, then a supervisor, then a foreman, and finally a plant manager.
But only if the assembly line exists here in the first place.
These programs – these advancement opportunities – aren’t offered just as a quota system. Companies know that their best employees are people who are well-rounded, people who’ve worked in multiple departments, and who therefore know both the company and its products well.
Businesses don’t offer great career opportunities as charity; they offer great career opportunities because it’s good for the company too.
When the Left opposes an effort – any effort – to increase manufacturing in America, remember what they are really doing. They are consciously denying a career path to the people who need that opportunity the most, the millions of people for whom a factory beginning is often virtually the only launching pad for any kind of independent and secure life.
So, when you hear the Left oppose President Trump’s efforts to bring back more manufacturing to these shores – through the use of such reforms as tax cuts, regulatory reform, labor law simplification, and more creative use of tariffs – remember what they are really opposing:
By opposing reindustrialization, the Left is opposing the creation of jobs for millions of people who can’t find one.
The Left is opposing the creation of a variety of career paths for people who have all kinds of different skills, and just need a chance for those skills to surface and be given a chance to develop.
The Left is opposing getting millions of people off the dole, and becoming self-sufficient.
Why might the American Left oppose programs that actually get millions of their dependents off the dole? We might not like to contemplate the truth, but we know, don’t we?
Copyright 2025 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
Substack: American Free News Network Substack
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA
2 thoughts on “The Reindustrialization of America – and Its Most Stubborn Opposition”