There’s a certain grim irony in watching today’s right-wing political class sabotage the very global systems that once made their version of “traditional family values” economically viable. And by “traditional,” of course, they don’t mean the truly old model—subsistence farming, communal labor, multigenerational support. They mean a very specific, very recent historical blip: the postwar, single-income, male-breadwinner household. A structure subsidized, not by timeless virtue, but by rubble, racism, and Roosevelt.
It’s worth recalling that this brief window of prosperity—white, nuclear, middle class—wasn’t the natural fruit of conservative ideals. It was the byproduct of two enormous, liberal internationalist forces: the decimation of industrial competition in World War II, and a massive, coordinated effort by FDR and allies to build an open, rules-based global trade order. These policies were not incidental—they were essential. And yes, they were deeply flawed and racially exclusionary in practice. But they also laid the foundation for an economy that, for a moment, allowed bottom-half men to earn enough to support families in ways that now seem mythic.
What’s tragic, then, is that the same political movement now claiming to defend the “traditional family” is dismantling the architecture that made their version of that family possible in the first place. As John Ganz recently put it, “[MAGA Republicans] are destroying everything that kept the world relatively prosperous and safe for the past 80 years.”
Tariffs are at the center of this self-defeating crusade. We know—from history, from economics, from lived experience—that tariffs don’t revive domestic manufacturing in any sustained way. Trump’s own 2018–2019 tariff spree resulted in net losses in manufacturing jobs. Bush’s steel tariffs fared no better. Even in the 19th century, when American agriculture still reigned, tariffs made life harder for farmers by making imported equipment more expensive.
Now, tariffs are sold as a tool to protect workers and restore “family values,” but in practice they punish working-class families by raising prices on goods they rely on. And when those price hikes aren’t met with real wage growth—because they rarely are—the result is a net loss in economic stability. And with economic insecurity comes exactly the sort of familial instability the right claims to want to reverse.
So why push them? Part of the answer lies in the political utility of trade restrictions: they create endless opportunities for those in power to dole out exemptions, punish enemies, reward donors. They invite corruption. Trump has already signaled his openness to such “offers,” in what feels like a perfectly American blend of strongman populism and late-stage capitalism.
Ganz, again, offers a sobering reminder: "FDR’s embrace of trade wasn’t just about prosperity—it was about avoiding the “beggar-thy-neighbor” spiral that deepened the Great Depression. It was a recognition that mutual flourishing was possible—and necessary—in a globalized world. To reject that lesson is to court another age of retrenchment, division, and shared decline."
And what of the “traditional family”? That ideal—so often evoked, so rarely interrogated—was never as stable or universal as its defenders suggest. It was exclusionary, isolating, and, for many, quietly devastating. Its decline has brought loneliness, yes, but also new forms of freedom, new kinds of kinship, and the beginnings of more honest conversations about what support, love, and solidarity might look like in this century.
We are, undeniably, in a precarious moment. But precarity can be clarifying. It reminds us that what we build next—economically, politically, familially—does not need to mimic the past to be good. It simply needs to be more just, more inclusive, and more resilient. And maybe, if we get very lucky and a little bit wise, more joyful too.
