Your Children’s Children Will Die in Our Factories

The competition is fierce, but no one can paint quite as vivid a picture of the future technofeudalist dystopia the Trump administration is trying to build as Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, of “the army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America” fame.

Lutnick filled in some blanks of the expanded MAGA dystopic universe on CNBC this week, when he said “these are really good paying jobs, they start at $70s, $80s, $90,000 [a year]. These are tradecraft. It’s time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. This is the new model, where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.” 

The administration’s new fantasy—the apparent boon Trump’s tariffs will bring—is a future in which you will work at the factory until you die, and your children will work at the same factory until they die, and your children’s children will work at the factory until they die. You will all make mid-to-high five figures; there is no pitch for or thought of upward mobility, of working in a factory to fund your children’s education so that they might one day manage or own the factory (or do something else entirely!) Lutnick said that the thousands of Americans who work in car factories now are “trained to care of robotic arms, they’re trained to keep the air conditioner working.” 

Left unsaid and totally unexamined is who, in the long term, will make the basic scientific discoveries or invent the technologies and products of the future that will keep the United States an economic superpower; the administration is firing the scientists, defunding and threatening universities, trying to abolish the Department of Education. The hope literally appears to be that Elon Musk’s AI will invent new things for us and will replace all of the knowledge work and expertise that this administration has already inexplicably destroyed. 

There is nothing wrong with working at a factory and there is nothing wrong with investing in American manufacturing or creating programs that incentivize it. We have long needed to invest in community colleges, technical colleges, and vocational schools to do job training and to offer alternative paths for people who can’t or don’t want to go to college. But “factory worker” is the only job that anyone in this administration can imagine. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Tucker Carlson that the fired government workers, many of whom are coders, scientists, medical professionals, etc, will also become factory workers: “We are shedding excess labor in the federal government … that will give us the labor that we need for the new manufacturing,” he said.

But even this administration realizes that eventually, robots will do those jobs. And so the only jobs that follow them are air conditioning guy for the automated factory and guy who helps the robot arm move. Lutnick himself seems to have no idea how many jobs there will be or what they will be, whether they will be “automated,” or what. 

“We are inventing everything in the world, but we’re letting everyone else build it. We invent the iPhone, which is awesome,” he said on Newsmax. “Why do we let everyone else build it? Why can’t we build it here? The key is AI and automation have made that in reach. I understand why you need zillions of other people to work on it, but it’s time now, can automation build that plant here? Where we can employ, we don’t need millions of Americans to do it, we need hundreds of thousands of Americans to work in those factories, and I think we’re going to create 5 million great tradecraft jobs in America.” 

Meanwhile, the administration is not only attacking schools, foreign students (who disproportionately create businesses and jobs), scientists, and knowledge workers, it has actively gone to war with the clean energy industry, which has been creating the fastest-growing blue collar paths to the middle class, which are wind turbine service technicians and solar panel installers. 

Stephen Miller says the country will eliminate the Department of Education and that, “children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots.” Perhaps they will go to the taxpayer-funded religious charter schools?

It is possible to imagine a grand back-to-America manufacturing strategy that does not require inflicting pain and economic suffering on the American people and on the rest of the world. It is possible and good to bring manufacturing jobs back to America, and to rebuild an upwardly-mobile middle class by focusing on technical training, local ownership, and reskilling through incentives and strategic, carefully-considered tariffs that are rolled out over time. But that is not what is being pursued, and it’s not what is being done. What is being pursued is a self-inflicted emergency designed to purge immigrants, scientists, and higher education from American life and the American economy in favor of an economy that may have worked many decades ago but will not work now.

The only upshot of any of this is that these policies are wildly unpopular, and that this future is exceedingly unlikely to actually come to pass. 

But here’s what this future, being pitched by the plain language and plain actions of this administration, is. It is very sad and very small. It lacks imagination. It lacks dynamism. Men will not be allowed in women’s spaces and women will not be allowed in men’s spaces. Women will be tradwives and will be paid $5,000 have babies. Those babies will not have parents who can afford to buy them 30 dolls, they will have two dolls instead, and they will like it. The boys will not have any dolls, though. The rich and powerful will stockpile supplies because they know the impacts of their policies. You will not buy breakfast at McDonald’s as a treat. Your friends will be AI chatbots. Your therapist will be a chatbot. You will pay massive tariffs to try food from other countries. You will work in the factory. You will not own the factory. They will own the factory. You will die at the factory. Your kids will learn about AI at the technical college, and then they will work in the factory. Your kids will not own the factory. Their kids will own the factory. Their kids will go on Fox News and tell you that they have created good jobs, patriotic jobs. American jobs, not Chinese jobs. Jobs that your kids and their kids and their kids’ kids can work at until they die. Your kids will repair the air conditioning. Your kids will screw in the screws. Your children’s children will move the robot arms, like their father and grandfather did before them.