Globalization’s Collapse: Why the middle class views Trump’s tariffs as their last stand

In the late summer of 1999, as the dot-com bubble grew and the American economy thrived during what The Atlantic would later refer to as “The Roaring Nineties,” the United States found itself at the height of a new world order. The Soviet Union had dissolved, the Cold War was a distant memory, and globalization — celebrated as the victory of free markets and liberal democracy — was the doctrine of the time.

The Clinton administration, buoyed by post-Cold War optimism, pushed through NAFTA and ushered the U.S. into the World Trade Organization, promising a future of unbounded prosperity. Economists pointed to surging GDP growth in globalization-focused nations, as Boundless U.S. History notes, while corporate leaders were eager at the prospect of cheaper labor and untapped markets. It was, in the words of Brookings, an era when the “Washington Consensus” on free trade seemed unassailable — an ideological juggernaut ready to weave the world into a single, shimmering tapestry of commerce.

Fast forward to March 24, 2025, and that tapestry lies in tatters. The factories of the Rust Belt stand silent, their hulks a testament to jobs shipped overseas. The middle class, once the backbone of American life, has been hollowed out, with stagnant wages and crumbling towns. Supply chains, stretched thin across oceans, snapped during the COVID-19 pandemic, exposing a nation dependent on foreign powers — chiefly China — for everything from steel to semiconductors. Globalization, once the golden calf of the elite, has shown itself to be a false idol, leaving a trail of economic wreckage and social discontent. And into this breach steps Donald Trump, armed with a policy as old as the republic itself: tariffs.

In a recent interview on The Tucker Carlson Show, Robert Lighthizer, former U.S. Trade Representative under Trump and the intellectual architect of his trade agenda, presented his case with the precision of someone who has spent decades analyzing America’s economic decline. “A country that doesn’t make things is a country destined to lose,” he stated. For Lighthizer, tariffs are not just a tax; they represent a lifeline, a way to revive an industrial base that has been hollowed out by years of free trade ideology.

Trump’s economic vision, articulated by Lighthizer and echoed across platforms such as The Conservative Treehouse and Occidental Dissent, represents a radical departure from the globalist orthodoxy of the past thirty years — a bid to reclaim America’s sovereignty, one steel mill at a time.

The story of how we got here reflects as much hubris as it does economics. In the 1990s, as American Foreign Relations recounts, the U.S. viewed itself as the undisputed leader of a unipolar world. Globalization was not merely a policy but a mission — to spread capitalism and democracy to every corner of the globe. NAFTA, signed in 1994, was the first major salvo, opening borders to a surge of inexpensive goods from Mexico and Canada. The WTO followed suit, binding the U.S. to a system of rules that valued efficiency over resilience. Corporate America celebrated, drawn by the allure of lower labor costs in places like Shenzhen and Guadalajara.

The Brookings analysis of trade policy during that decade captures the sentiment: a belief that open markets would benefit everyone and that the rising tide of global wealth would support American workers just as it did for Wall Street.

It didn’t. The tide came in, but it drowned the heartland. Manufacturing jobs, once the bedrock of the middle class, vanished at a staggering pace. Between 1990 and 2010, the U.S. lost roughly six million such jobs, many to China after its entry into the WTO in 2001.

Communities in Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—places where steel and auto plants once thrived — have withered into ghost towns, their populations decimated by unemployment and opioids. Endless economic charts illustrate this decline with cold clarity: the outsourcing boom enriched corporations and foreign economies while leaving American workers to fend for themselves.

Income inequality widened, as the top one percent reaped the rewards of global capital flows while the bottom half saw their share of the pie shrink. The Atlantic’s retrospective on the nineties highlights the irony: a decade of economic boom for some was a slow-motion catastrophe for others.

Worse still, globalization tied America to a web of dependencies that proved dangerous. When the pandemic hit, the nation found itself scrambling for masks, ventilators, and pharmaceuticals — all sourced from abroad, much of it from a China increasingly viewed as an adversary. Lighthizer, in an interview with CBS News, described it as an “existential threat” — a vulnerability that tariffs seek to address by bringing production home.

A Politico article on Lighthizer’s groundwork for Trump’s next tariff push underscores that economic independence is not merely about jobs but about survival. A nation that cannot produce its own essentials is vulnerable to others — a lesson the elite of the 1990s never learned.

Trump’s tariff policy is less a leap into the unknown and more a return to first principles. After all, tariffs have been the lifeblood of American economic policy for much of its history, funding the government and protecting emerging industries from foreign competition. During his first term, Trump imposed duties on steel and aluminum, leading some domestic mills to spring back to life — a small but tangible sign of what’s possible. Today, Lighthizer argues that these measures can prevent a broader economic crash by fostering a manufacturing renaissance.

Critics, of course, cry foul — tariffs raise consumer prices, they argue, and risk trade wars. However, Lighthizer counters that foreign exporters often absorb the costs to remain competitive, and the long-term benefits —jobs, wages, resilience — far outweigh the short-term pain. ProPublica’s profile of Lighthizer underscores the stakes: he has “blown up sixty years of trade policy,” and what follows is anybody’s guess. Yet, the argument for tariffs is not only economic — it’s cultural, even moral.

Globalization hasn’t just offshored jobs; it has eroded identities. The Brookings essay on the “globalization challenge” suggests this: as local economies were absorbed into a borderless market, communities lost their anchors. The uniformity of Walmart shelves replaced the pride of “Made in America.”

The backlash — political, social, and visceral — has fueled Trump’s rise. He promises to improve the economy and restore a sense of national purpose. His policies, ranging from tariffs to tax cuts for domestic producers, aim to rebuild what globalization has dismantled.

The dream of a borderless world in the 1990s was alluring, but it was built on shaky ground. It presumed that markets could address all problems, that sovereignty was outdated, and that the American worker could endlessly adjust to a system rigged against them. Trump, despite his bluster, recognizes this. His tariffs are a blunt tool, true, but they represent a reckoning — a rejection of the elite consensus that has left millions behind.

Whether they succeed remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: globalization has failed, and Trump is betting that America can find its way back — not to isolation, but to strength — through the old, unglamorous tool of tariffs.