The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's Factory Reset with Adam Tooze and Sohrab Ahmari
Thu, 20 Mar 2025
As the Trump administration pursues a dramatic economic realignment, we're joined by Adam Tooze, author of Chartbook on Substack, and Sohrab Ahmari, US Editor of UnHerd and author of Tyranny, Inc., to examine the feasibility and implications of an American industrial revival. We analyze the administration's strategy for reshoring manufacturing, debate whether reversing globalization is possible or desirable, and consider what economic nationalism would accomplish for a workforce that has largely moved beyond factory jobs. Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Researcher & Associate Producer – Gillian Spear Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the podcast about?
Hey, folks, I just want to let you know your prayers have been answered. You remember, everybody's in L.A. I actually was lucky enough to participate in it. It's back. Everybody's live with John Mulaney. Coming to Netflix again. Mulaney, who's just so funny. And tall, that's the part I don't really care for, the tall part, but so funny.
If you've never seen it, it's just the most, I think, creative and spontaneous. The guests, the fan calls, and there was a robot thing that scared the hell out of me the last time. You just don't know what's going to happen. If you want something you haven't seen before, a fresh take on Late Night Talk. And listen, who knows stale late-night talk better than me, the man who invented it?
This is your show. Check it out. It's fantastic. Tune in weekly at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Everybody's live with John Mulaney, now playing only on Netflix. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome once again to the weekly show podcast with Jon Stewart. My name is Jon Stewart, and it is March something. I don't know what day we're taping this. March 19th, we're taping this.
I don't know when it's going to air. Probably March 20th, which gives 24 hours. for more shit to happen that will not be addressed in any way, shape, or form on the podcast because things are moving. They're moving quickly, ladies and gentlemen. This week, we did a bit on the show concerning what we might consider for the Democrats a sense of fecklessness.
Feckle, feckles, fecklessness, fecklessful. Are people feckful? There's a feckless, but there's really nobody who is feckful. And maybe that's what the Democrats are looking for. Somebody feckful. You can find some feckfulness. And obviously, Senator Charles Schumer was the avatar through which we passed our frustrations, our angers, our sadness, our desperation.
We passed it through him in attempt to raise his glasses from the lower part of his nose through telekinesis all the way up, all the way from here. I'm doing this right now. It's on a podcast, so you probably don't know. It's coming all the way. Here we go. We're urging, come on, come on, guys. Come on, you can do it. And get them to focus.
And I think we need to make clear what is being asked for here is not nihilism. It's not the kind of shut the government down. Fuck all this. Nobody cares because there's a great understanding. But they themselves spoke of this was the moment of leverage that they had been neutered to the point because they don't have
the majority in the house, even though it's slim and they don't have the majority in the Senate. They don't, you know, but the, because the senators didn't have 60, the Democrats could have filibustered to maybe extract anything. But I think the frustration is a, you're not clear on the specifics of what they would extract if they could. And B, they just fucking didn't. And
Don't make a big theatrical production of choosing fighters and we're going to do this. And, you know, I think they keep counting on this very strange notion that somehow in the House of Representatives, Massey will rule the day. Like, this is all theater. Even in the Senate when you got, I think, I don't know how many.
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Chapter 2: Who are the guests and their perspectives?
And I don't know if we're in act one or act two or where the fuck we are in this, but it's a play and they're putting it on and we need better than that. And, uh, the play that's being put on now is, is an economic one. And I want to get, we have two guests today that I think are really, really good. Uh, One is an economic historian.
The other is, I'd say, more of a conservative center-right who's got a real focus on economic populism. And we're going to talk a little bit about the play that is being put on about our economy and how it's going to be transitioned and what the reality is of how they're going to be transitioning it. So I'm just going to get to them now because they're fantastic.
We are going to get into it with our guests. I want to thank them for joining us. Adam Tooze, author of Chartbook, which is on Substack, and Saurabh Amari, U.S. editor of Unheard and author of Tyranny, Inc. And they are joining us today to tell us, if I may, gentlemen, and I hate to put you in this position, the future. You are my soothsayers. Adam, I'll start with you as the economist.
You just put that on me. I just put that on you. It seems evident that there is a remaking of the American economy, or at least the attempt to do so through the Trump economic policies, whether it's through tariffs and more protectionism. less government spending, these kinds of things. We've had sort of two economic orders since the New Deal.
We had the New Deal economic order, and then we sort of had that neoliberalism that started with maybe Carter and Reagan and moved its way on up. Is that the end goal in your mind for what is happening here? Is this an engineering of a different kind of economy than we've kind of been accustomed to?
I mean, you might think that, and that would in a sense be a continuity with the Biden team as well, because they were talking in rather similar terms. I mean, Jake Sullivan had that famous speech where he talked about, you know, new Washington consensus, post-neoliberalism was all the rage.
Right. But that was the CHIPS Act, which was basically like, oh, well.
Chips and IRA and that. And that's the question is like, where's the beef? And if they go on talking like this and it's quite difficult to actually put your finger on what they're doing and whether it could possibly be for real, you start wondering whether it isn't more like a facelift. It's more that Mar-a-Lago aesthetic where we all pretend to be 25. And no judgment, like that's fine.
You go do your thing, but we aren't actually 25. And there's a way in which something like that is clearly true about the economy. I mean, the economy, there's never literally ever in history been a case of a society as successful as the US and as rich as the US that has somehow reversed the structure of the relationship between the key bits, right? The service sector, the industrial sector.
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Chapter 3: Is the American economy undergoing a transformation?
Oh, very much so, sir.
You can't reverse, certainly nothing in history to date has suggested you can do that. And the US industrial and manufacturing sector right now isn't the platform from which you would expect a kind of reconquest or a transformation of all of American society.
Well, do you think that, Adam, is generally this kind of reshaping done either because of a catastrophic event like the depression or the introduction of a new technology like industrialization or in the case of maybe that neoliberalism, the internet and a more global transportation and supply line hub? Is that generally sort of how this all starts?
Technology is key here, and that's been the driver all along. The basic story, and this is why this is all so kind of ironic and weird, is that we've gotten really, really good at manufacturing an industry in the same way as we got really, really good at farming. Once upon a time, the vast majority of Americans were farmers, and that wasn't a lifestyle choice.
That was because we just couldn't feed ourselves because we were so bad at farming. We got very good at farming.
I don't know if you know, Adam, but labor costs for our farming were quite low. I can't remember why, but-
Yeah. I mean, that's the norm, right? Because people are desperate and all over the world and always been desperate. And so it's really anomalous to have rich farmers. That's a really peculiar situation to be in. Right.
Well, we also had a system there where I think we made them do that.
Yeah, for sure. You get slave labor, you get various types of forced labor. Right. But the story here of technological change is one that just cuts through this. The crisis story, the New Deal that you might be invoking, for instance, in the 30s, it doesn't change anything about the balance between the bits, right?
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Chapter 4: What are the historical influences on current economic policy?
Yeah. So I agree with Adam in the sense that what we see is too often under the Trumpians, but also under the Biden administration. These two, as Adam pointed out, have actually been in a kind of continuity. The Biden administration came in and kept the tariffs against certain Chinese goods, in fact, expanded them to electric vehicle components and so on.
So there's this broad attempt by the American ruling class to try to have a different political economy. And I agree that what they're doing including under Trump too, is not enough.
Where I disagree is the idea that the sectoral mix of an economy between agriculture, services, manufacturing, and so on is impossible to change or re-engineer because in a way, the tradition that I look to, the Hamiltonian tradition, it wasn't inevitable that the US would become an industrial superpower, a manufacturing superpower. It was a result of policies advanced by the Hamiltonians.
And when I say the Hamiltonians, I don't just mean Alexander Hamilton himself, although he laid down the vision, but a series of political leaders who advanced it.
Well, break that down a little bit then. Are you talking about sort of a central, a federalized system, central banks, a way of government intervention and creating markets?
Yeah. The triple foundations where you can summarize them in kind of one word terms as tariff, canal, and bank. Talking about the early republic's economy, the tariff being, of course, an attempt to protect America's nascent manufacturing sector from the manufacturing superpower of that time, which was Great Britain.
And the Brits, as Hamilton knew well, really were determined to turn and maintain America as a kind of backwater, a swampy backwater that was a resource pool for them and that would be a captive market for their manufacturers. In fact, in 1721, the British Board of Trade declared, quote, that the colonies, lacking their own manufacturers, will always remain dependent on Great Britain.
So knowing that, the Hamiltonians said, no, we're going to protect our nascent industries with tariffs by protecting also the sort of maintaining industrial workers, trained, competent industrial workers in the country. But not just that, and that's the part where I think the Trumpians are getting it wrong by just doing tariffs.
He also did, you mentioned the bank, which ensures the steady flow, disciplined flow of credit and the idea of, that the financial system should serve the real economy. That is, we don't have finance for its own sake. And that's why banking, for much of the country, wasn't nearly as important as it is today. Wall Street now plays this overweening role in the economy. The Hamiltonians stopped that.
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Chapter 5: Can the US manufacturing sector be revitalized?
Yeah, so with all this talk of plastic surgery, I'm reminded of Michelle Welbeck, the French novelist who said, you know, the prevalence of plastic surgery is a sign of sexual generosity. I don't know how that applies to many factories.
that one of the books behind you, Saurabh? Is that what's sitting on that bookshelf?
I definitely have some Welbeck in the back. All right. But here's what I'd say is that, so the reason that the Hamiltonian tradition, again, not just Hamilton himself, but I would include Abraham Lincoln and his economic advisor, Henry Charles Carey and Teddy Roosevelt, and especially the FDR and the New Deal order, they all emphasize manufacturing. It goes back to Hamilton himself said for the
For the safety and independence of national life, you need manufacturing independence, something that we encountered in 2020 during the pandemic when we realized that from basic components for many drugs to personal protective equipment for our first responders and so on, couldn't produce that on our own because we'd offshored so much manufacturing.
And I heard you railing against offshoring, John, in your conversation with Senator Sanders as well. I don't care for it. So I would say, look, there is something special about manufacturing because the period of lowest inequality in American history, the New Deal order, did coincide in an industry-led economy. Manufacturing was about nearly a third of the US GDP in 1950, down to about 10% today.
Now, I don't know how much Adam agrees with this or not. I think that that wasn't the result of world historical deterministic inevitability, it was a result of concrete policy choices where in the beginning of the 1970s, we decided to favor finance over the real economy. And this kind of addiction to cheap labor began where not just through offshoring, but also
lots of immigration and so on, we disempowered the American working class. And of course, the anti-union thrust of American policy that really took off under Reagan. So there is something about manufacturing, for example, the NYU sociologist, Vivek Chhibber is a Marxist, but lots of other scholars as well have shown that manufacturing jobs are easier to unionize, certainly than service sectors.
There's something about the proximity of workers in a regular stable hours during the day, and even the kind of geographic proximity that factory life creates compared to gigafied labor. Even the Biden administration was as friendly as you could get to organize labor, but the union density, the share of workers that are covered by collective bargaining was so low now.
And also, listen, their infrastructure investments were enormous. They just couldn't build any of it. All right, going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. And we are back. So there's questions here that arise for me. One is, are we fighting a conventional war when everyone else is using drones and lasers? you know, to rebuild something, creating a kind of, will it be a facade?
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Chapter 6: How does globalization affect American labor?
Right. And because of the capital investments involved, the manufacturing, the local factory boss is a lot more, I mean, he might be a jerk and you have to fight him with unions. And I'm all for that. As Adam knows, I'm a pretty, for someone who is of the center, right, I'm all for, you know, trying to boost our union density and all that.
But still he's connect, he or she is connected to the local community in a way that Wall Street or distant, you know, Silicon Valley tech firms are not. But okay, so if we try our best to increase the manufacturing share of the workforce, that will hit a limit.
However, let's try at first, because the thing is, if we get to the point where we break corporate America's addiction to cheap labor, especially through offshoring, it will force them to pay higher wages here locally or to innovate. Right now, the current kind of globalization model that we're hopefully transitioning out of incentivizes them
not to actually do labor-saving technologies, but to try to do the same things with cheaper and cheaper labor.
Finding more and more countries to exploit, which by the way, we do in the United States. I mean, South Carolina, right-to-work states do the same thing that globalization does to America to states that have unions. I mean, Michigan gets decimated by maybe Mexican plants, but also by right-to-work states in South Carolina and you know, and tax in all kinds of other places.
But just to finish this point, and I agree with that, you know, I welcome our robot overlords. Like, let's bring them over. And if we're going to have like a full luxury automated communism. Let them be our robots.
You know, and then, you know, you have an economy that can pay more for its caretakers, for the kinds of workers that Adam mentioned, that the strength of the manufacturing sector can absorb higher wages in, you know, Burger King or in, home healthcare and all those other sectors. But they won't.
You see that the sectors where labor cannot travel, fast food, healthcare, where communities must have them in there, look at how hard they fight to depress their wages. And I'm not just talking about the people who run those businesses. I'm talking about the Fed. The Fed raised interest rates in part because of what they called Wage inflation.
Overheating.
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Chapter 7: What are the contradictions in current economic strategies?
There's lots of different variants of it, but it's essentially recognizable as American social democracy, like in Europe. And the partners of the New Deal Democrats in doing this were the professional managerial class. In other words, folks like us. And I read Trumpianism and the Musk element within it as a double attack, right?
In the name of the working class, which is largely non-existent and not in the room, de facto, their immediate victims are civil servants, public servants in federal government doing things like weather forecasting. By the way, demonized.
demonized as educational statistics. Somehow they're not the working class. Somehow they're not the middle class.
No, they're not. But in many cases, they're not the working class. They are actually university educated middle class people. American class language is confusing.
But they're being portrayed as a criminal element. You bastard testing our water for fecal matter. How dare you, sir? Exactly.
How dare you? So this is like some kind of a racket. Right. And that is how I read this current moment as a double attack, effectively continuing the... undermining of the real conditions for working Americans, but with a novel element of a really no holds barred attack on the PMC, on the professional managerial class.
And that includes big corporate capital, which has its DEI and its ESG agendas, none of which they're down with. And it's done in the name of a kind of entrepreneurialism, which is Jacksonian, which is about breaking things and seeing what happens next.
But by the way, let's also be clear. There is no real ESG, DEI ethos in any of this. That was all wallpaper and gilding and tinsel.
But it was wallpaper that was held in place by tens of thousands of people whose job it was and who did believe in it and whose careers were actually owed to it. It's a real thing. And who are real people. There were real people and talented and there were elements of that story that actually worked, right? Affirmative action was a program that actually transformed American society for the better.
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