A tweet got me thinking about manufacturing jobs. The poster asked, “Do we really want manufacturing jobs back?” He seemed incredulous and saw an attempt to re-shore manufacturing as “turning back the clock.” My answer: Yes.

As the post-COVID “recovery” showed us, America and many Western countries are extremely vulnerable in their supply chains and access to all manner of necessities, from pants to pharmaceuticals. And that should not be, especially if it makes us dependent on global competitors (if not adversaries). In the “globalist” canvas, the world is a workshop where specialization is assigned. In that “capitalist” version of five-year planning, the developed countries should produce “intellectual” property, not steel or jeans.

This is truly a liberal mindset. I’ll relate an anecdote. When you are sent to learn a language in the State Department (40 hours/week for a year), one part of the program is having forced discussions on the vocabulary set you’re working on. In learning Mandarin, after our economics component we were working on immigration. We talked about jobs and their impact on immigration. Now I know we have to have a variety of viewpoints just to practice the language, but what floored me in our discussion was that my classmates were all largely against my position that America needs manufacturing jobs. “America doesn’t need jobs like that anymore!” was the consensus. It was clearly the diplomatic Marie Antoinette equivalent of “let them learn code!”

Our outsourcing of these jobs is one of many factors responsible for our country’s social dislocations. One reason marriage is in decline is that jobs — especially jobs for men — that don’t require a college diploma (whether it’s really necessary or not) are disappearing. What do those guys do?

I began college in Michigan 48 years ago. It was the first place I lived away from home, and I was proud to study in the Midwest. Back then, names like Detroit, Dearborn, Pontiac, Toledo, Sandusky, Cleveland, Steubenville, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Gary, Wheeling, Weirton, Buffalo, Rochester, and Milwaukee all had respectability — gritty respectability maybe, but respectability. They were places that made America great. They were places where an honest man could do an honest job and live decently. And, as Prof. Patrick Deneen pointed out in a lecture (here, starting at 26:00), compare the before/after pictures of three Midwestern cities versus three German cities, and ask who won/who lost the War? What J.D. Vance wrote about in his Hillbilly Elegy touched a nerve in the decline not just of jobs but of hope and life in “flyover country.”

In parts of the world, this jobs lacuna for those without college degrees is filled by quality apprentice programs. I saw that up-close when I lived in Switzerland. Various tradesmen would come by the house for different things: fix this appliance, child-proof the stairs, repair that woodwork. They often came with a young person in training. What they did was not just “on the clock.” They took time to teach their apprentice how to fix the dishwasher, install the plexiglass on the open railings, or put in new woodwork. And he gave him time to practice. Sure, stuff in Switzerland was not cheap — but it lasted. Stealing Ford’s slogan, “quality is job one.”

The paradox is that the people who bleat loudest about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” advocate a global model that is anything but. Globalism has led to homogenization, inequality, and exclusion.

Consider diversity. My childhood foray into the world was my father’s annual four-hour trek to his father and family in northeastern Connecticut. But in that little slice of America, this kid already sensed differences between Central Jersey, New York, and southern New England, in part simply because in the 1960s, most of the “rest stops” along the way were local restaurants and diners serving local fare. Today, you can drive coast-to-coast and largely get the same standard stuff from the same corporate fast food providers from sea to shining sea. Is that progress?

Consider equality. A globalized economy has been good for the “haves,” much less so for the “have nots.” Drive through many of the cities I listed above and you’ll see a shadow of what they were. As a kid, I remember proudly seeing the sign emblazoned across the side of a Delaware River bridge, which read, “Trenton Makes—The World Takes.” Well, Trenton’s still there. It doesn’t make much anymore, and what it takes, it takes from the world. With the exception of New Brunswick, which leveraged Rutgers, Johnson and Johnson, and other pharmaceuticals to transform into a “knowledge base,” New Jersey’s great manufacturing cities — Newark, Paterson, Passaic, Trenton, Camden — are generally not places you’ll find a job or want to raise a family. Is that progress?

Consider exclusion. Why does Vance’s hillbilly country have its problems? In part because people decided to stay even when their employers did not. And people’s loyalty to place should count for something; man is not, after all, merely a consumer Pavlovian dog. The globalist answer is “move,” but should people have to give up roots because the wealthy prefer to make a few cents more on a T-shirt made in Dalian rather than Dayton? America’s Rust Belt should not be the economic equivalent of a giant abandoned strip mine, its wealth extracted, its ruin left. Is that progress?

The disdain for manufacturing jobs comes from a consumerism that sees goods merely as “stuff” to which a price tag is attached. That’s why it lauded the “service economy” that replaced the manufacturing sector in America. But, as Oren Cass points out in his great book, The Once and Future Worker, not all goods are created equal. A steel plant sustains all sorts of supportive local businesses, including Dinah’s Diner. Absent that plant, Dinah’s is never going to have the supporting economic footprint its former patron had. A guy with a good job could treat himself to a coffee at Dinah’s; a guy with no job is going to think twice about buying his $8 coffee at a corporate behemoth offering “forced joy.” A steel beam made in Steubenville may very well still be standing in a building in Sydney. A cup of Joe bought at Dinah’s of Steubenville likely won’t make it to the first rest stop on the Indiana Toll Road. And you need to sell a lot more coffees to make the money you did for that girder.

“Globalism” is another example of an ignored Catholic social justice principle: subsidiarity. It is good that things are small, that there is comprehensive local service for localities, that the whole world is not one vast, Adam Smith hub-and-spoke “market”– a market in which the American worker in Michigan cannot and should not have to “compete” with his counterpart in a Malaysian sweatshop. All that perspective was lost in our “free trade” mania (which mouthed a commitment to “fair trade,” too, while rarely following through).

So, back to my original tweeter: “Do we really want manufacturing jobs?” Yes, we do. And for lots of reasons far beyond, and which may even trump, the “economic.”