It has taken a long while and a great deal of adversity. But Americans of many political persuasions – Democrat and Republican, progressive and conservative, partisan and independent – are at last rediscovering something we’d come close to forgetting.
I refer to the existential importance of our nation’s productive capabilities in a world of transnational peril. As the indispensible basis of our national security, our social stability, and hence our persistence as a polity alike, and as a base that’s been steadily undermined by decades of misguided ‘free trade’ and ‘financialization,’ our role as a ‘workshop of the world’ is a role we should never have relinquished and must now restore. And we must do so as quickly as possible.
Two American statespersons have stood out far more than most others in designing and articulating what I’ll call the new ‘operating system’ of this recovery – the ‘OS’ of a New Economic Patriotism (‘NEP’). They are Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of Silicon Valley and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.
Although I have done work for both legislators – see, e.g., here, here, and here – it is Representative Khanna with whom I’ve worked most closely of late. It is also Ro Khanna who’s been most consistently out front of the NEP. So my elaboration of the vision in question will probably resemble his just a little more closely than Senator Rubio’s. Nevertheless, I believe much I shall say here will be approved by both statespersons.
So what is this ‘NEP’? What does the vision entail?
The first thing to note is the choice of that word ‘Patriotism,’ which Representative Khanna takes great care to distinguish from ‘Nationalism.’ The latter term nowadays carries regrettably negative, or at any rate ‘zero sum,’ connotations. It suggests that attending to our own productive development might entail disfavor of other nations’ productive development – that all is a dog-eat-dog war among nations for ‘market share.’ That in turn further suggests suspicion of immigrants – which nearly all Americans either are or are descended from.
Such tendencies are of course not what Representative Khanna seeks or endorses – quite the contrary. Rather, the NEP vision is of a world in which all nations or groupings of nations with rich endowments of human creativity and natural resources can build long-term sustainable, broadly inclusive, and hence well-diversified economies.
We seek a world, in other words, in which all large groupings of people, be these single nations or collaborative groupings of smaller nations, enjoy rich agricultural, manufacturing, commercial, and financial capacities – literally all of the above – to such a degree that cross-border trade for each and all never will be a necessity but ever will be an option. Dependency, in our view, breeds mutual resentment and war among global ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’ not to say social strife among domestic ‘winners’ and ‘losers.’
And that is to be studiously avoided by all.
A strategy in which ‘winning’ need not entail ‘losing,’ in our view, is a strategy that all patriots everywhere – all who take sober pride in their peoples, their cultures, their histories and their futures – can sign on to at no cost to, and with no disrespect or humiliation of, others.
How might we do this? What does the NEP strategy look like in practice?
Well, after ‘patriotism,’ the next word to fix on above is ‘diversified.’ Here I refer, not to demographics, important though that be, but to production. I refer to the manifold means of both material and spiritual wealth-generation.
The New Economic Patriotism rests fundamentally on what I call by turns ‘the Production Agenda’ or ‘the New Productivism.’ And by that I mean continuous policy attention to all that’s required to enable a nation – a people – to fulfill every person’s full human potential. This potential, being that of a uniquely creative, uniquely productive presence on the earth – and, in time, in the Cosmos – is a sacred trust of which all of us are the joint custodians. We cannot squander anyone without immeasurable loss to humanity.
This is no mere obsession or idiosyncratic concern. It’s at the heart, in one way or another, of most economic and social philosophies, not to say religions and spiritual traditions, throughout human history. And it’s at the heart of America’s history itself – including our history as our own people, our own nation, since having ceased being a jumble of seaboard colonies.
Few Americans seem to talk any longer about how it was this very vision that drove our original thirteen colonies to declare independence from Great Britain in the first place. But that’s how it was: it was our full recognition of our sacred right to be our own producers, and our experience of our colonial overlords’ contempt for that right, which set off what was then called our ‘Glorious Cause’ – our revolution.
While ‘taxation without representation’ was of course part of this story, we forget the much larger story of which it was only one part. For the thing to recall here is not as much that there was taxing, as what was being taxed. What was being taxed was, in a phrase, ‘finished goods‘ – i.e., manufactures – from Britain. These were goods that Americans easily could have produced tax free – indeed likely could have produced better and cheaper than could British manufacturers – but which Britain was prohibiting us from producing.
Britain’s policy, you see, was to keep America in a permanently subservient colonial status – the status of mere suppliers of ‘unfinished inputs’ to British producers.
We were to chop wood, trap beavers, and grow crops to send back across the Atlantic, while leaving the spinning, the weaving, the shipbuilding, the iron-working and so forth to London, then Liverpool, then Glasgow and Manchester. That is what being a ‘colony’ means, after all. It means specializing in but one thing or productive for purposes determined by somebody else – the colonial ruler.
The alternative, which Americans demanded peacefully for decades until it grew clear only war would deliver, was productive equality, productive autonomy – that is, a productive economy as diverse as our natures and Nature allowed.
This is of course why our first President, George Washington, famously wore ‘homespun’ – American-made clothing – at his First Inauguration. He was ‘modeling’ a message: namely, that America’s aim to achieve full productive autonomy had at last been achieved. We were our own people now because we were our own producers now.
We depended on no one for anything, so that trade would henceforth be a matter of choice, not necessity – an option or luxury, not a form of dependency.
This original wellspring of our Revolution also explains, of course, all of our first Treasury Secretary’s – Alexander Hamilton’s – celebrated policies while in office. Hamilton effectively erected from scratch – with the full blessing, encouragement, and assistance of President Washington and most of the new Congress – the foundation of that great American ‘economic miracle’ of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the miracle that made the 20th century ‘the American Century.’
He established a national monetary system, a system of public finance, and both our first industrial research park and our first national infrastructure bank to jumpstart domestic productive capacity. He also pushed tariffs on imported finished goods until then-still-‘infant’ American industries could compete on their own.
As Hamilton did this, American manufacturing sprouted, then flourished and spread. And this in turn fostered remarkably rapid agricultural, commercial, and financial development as complements to our manufacturing industries – hence a fully diversified and autonomous national economy that quickly became the model for the world.
So successful was the program of Washington, Hamilton, and their followers that their vision acquired a telling name – ‘the American System’ of deliberate national development.
Soon an insightful German-American economist named Friedrich List generalized this into what he dubbed ‘the National System’ of national economic development. Deliberate adoption of the Hamilton/List system quickly brought first the German economic miracle of the late 19th century, then the Meiji Japanese and Romanov Russian economic miracles of the early 20th century, and then the ‘Asian’ and ‘Celtic’ ‘Tiger Miracles’ of the later 20th and early 21st centuries.
And this is of course what we’re seeing in China right now – in effect, what might be called ‘Hamiltonian Development with Chinese Characteristics.’
What about China, then, now that I’ve mentioned it? Is Ro Khanna’s New Economic Patriotism somehow ‘anti-China’?
Well it certainly needn’t be. There are two things to note here to understand why …
First, the US relation to China has grown surprisingly reminiscent of our pre-19th century relation to Great Britain. We supply unfinished goods – mainly agricultural products and other ‘produce of the earth’ such as minerals and wood – while China supplies the manufactured goods. This asymmetry is, moreover, like that with Britain before, the product of deliberate policy choices – in this case, clever choices by China and improvident choices by American business and political leaders.
But …
The second thing to note here is that there’s no necessary juridical basis for the imbalance this time. We are not chartered as, or otherwise legally constituted to be, colonies of China or anyone else. Hence we needn’t ‘rebel’ or make war to (re)establish our productive autonomy. We need only rediscover and redeploy our own homegrown Hamiltonian development policy domestically while reexamining our trading relations abroad, all with the aim of restoring our fully productively diverse, hence independent, national economy.
This is precisely why Representative Khanna never talks jingoistically about China or any other country, and why he regularly emphasizes that a restored mutual autonomy and new mutual respect between America and China will be good for both countries. Both countries, after all, are capable of being manufacturing superpowers – as are Europe, India, and many groupings of other, smaller countries. Why not let all of these flowers bloom? Why play as if all we could manage were ‘winner take all?’
Of course, rebalancing our trade relations with other peoples is but one building block of the New Productivism and the New Economic Patriotism, even as crucial as that is. For pride in our country entails pride in our people as well – pride in their potentials, pride in their God-given human ingenuity and miraculous creative powers. And any such pride will be manifest in policy – policy that assures free or affordable education to all, free or affordable medical access to all, easily affordable shelter and foodstuffs and job- and retirement-security for all.
You cannot be patriotic about your country – your patria – without being patriotic about your fellows – your compatriots – as well.
And it is perhaps this fact above all that distinguishes the New Economic Patriotism and the New Productivism from mere chest-beating nationalism or jingoism: It is this vision’s, not mere compatibility with, but its weddedness to – its in effect being one side of the same coin with – social and economic justice.
For no nation of peasants or serfs working a few oligarchs’ farms or factories has ever been a productive superpower rather than a mere ‘banana republic’ (the latter so-named thanks to dependence upon a few landowning families’ agricultural produce). All such past superpowers, including our own, have been built by huge middle classes – what our Founders called ‘sturdy yeomen’ – made possible by an abundance of public goods, from publicly assured education through infrastructure to homesteads and healthcare and childcare.
Let us, then, turn to the task. Let us reclaim our productive autonomy and manufacturing superpower status without denigrating any other peoples and without exploiting our own people – mistakes that in fact undermine the productive mission. Let’s build ourselves, our compatriots, and with them all of humanity back to its proper place in this world and this cosmos – the place of the producers.
That, in the end, is the New Productivism, and hence the New Economic Patriotism. A program affirmable by all, from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to Marco Rubio, and from Mike Gallagher to Pramila Jayapal, Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, and Ro Khanna.
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