Thus spoke Howard Lutnick:

“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. We let the auto plants go overseas.”

Howard Lutnick, for the most of us who were blissfully unaware, is in the Assclown’s cabinet as Commerce Secretary. So he has a teensy little bit of authority over the shape of the American workplace, and… fuck.

He did give some lip service to these being high-paying jobs servicing the factory machinery, but otherwise, as MSNBC put it:

Not to put too fine a point on this, but nothing about this model is new. In fact, it was quite common in the 19th century.

The New Republic, meanwhile, called it serfdom:

And that serfdom won’t even be widely available as automation takes over and the only job left is to watch the robots and make sure they don’t overheat.

So serfdom with a side of mass unemployment, in case the idea didn’t fail hard enough for you yet. Or, if you’re somewhat cynical, you can discard the “good paying jobs” part of Lutnick’s vision and call it plain old serfdom, in which we’re all bound for generations to low-paying jobs that only exist because robots would cost more.

But a few of you might be grumbling about how of course MSNBC and The New Republic oppose this, because they lean left and can be counted on to oppose everything Trump and the Trumpettes say and do. We should hear from a reliable righty on this subject, like, say, Liz Wolfe:

To me, Lutnick’s vision is sort of the opposite of the American dream. No disrespect to the 13 million Americans who work in manufacturing, or the roughly 2.4 million who work on farms […] but possibly the best thing about America is the upward mobility that allows many families to, over generations and with hard work, graduate from these more tedious forms of labor.

What? You mean not every red-blooded American conservative aspires to a lifetime in the dark Satanic mills, not only for themselves but for their children and grandchildren?

(Speaking of: that MSNBC story mentioned in passing that Lutnick’s grandfather was a dry cleaner. I don’t share the story’s implied belief that Lutnick is a gigantic hypicrite, because Lutnick has shown no evidence that he can handle a job as real as dry cleaning or small-business management – he went from college straight into forex brokerage.)

Now I’m trying to remember which novel had a little side story about the death of a small child in a factory press and the factory giving the grieving mother a free carpet as a sympathy gift. And I’m failing, because it’s been decades since I read it, and I’m having trouble searching for the book because of all the real-life cases…