What’s worse for innovation: MAGA or Mao?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. PITY THE young, for the world is run by old men. President Donald Trump (79) and China’s ruler, Xi Jinping (72), talk a good game about AI, robots and other futuristic marvels.
Deep down, though, both have a nostalgia for the 1950s. Mr Trump’s broad longing for lost greatness is no secret: he has it embroidered on hats. But in quite specific ways, his definition of the good life reflects conditions that prevailed in the years after his birth in 1946.
When Mr Trump last month pledged to “permanently pause" migration from “third-world countries", he accused America’s 51m foreign-born residents of bringing high crime and urban decay, and of overwhelming schools, hospitals, the housing supply and government finances. Such social dysfunction “did not exist after world war II", Mr Trump claimed. Actually, 1950s America saw its share of panics about social breakdown, as when experts warned that comic books were causing teenage delinquency.
What is true is that Mr Trump grew up in an unusually homogenous country. In Mr Trump’s youth the native-born share of the population approached 95% (it is around 85% today). Strict immigration controls were harshly enforced until the mid-1960s, when the rules were loosened.
In 1954 a federal campaign, derisively named Operation Wetback, deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican farm workers and labourers without the right papers. Mr Trump has praised this as a model. The 1950s set baselines for MAGA’s economic worldview, too.
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