Howard Lutnick, Trump’s trade whisperer, went on Face the Nation and laid it out with unnerving clarity. “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones—that kind of thing is going to come to America.” It was said with pride, as a sign of national renewal. As if exploitation, once outsourced, might now become a patriotic duty.
This isn’t the capitalism we were taught to recognise. For decades, globalisation was gospel: production was offshored, unions were broken, and labour costs were driven down by turning the world into one vast marketplace. American workers weren’t needed—they were too expensive, too entitled. The iPhone, sleek and frictionless, was manufactured by people you were never meant to see.
“Neoliberalism made you redundant. Post-neoliberalism wants you back—under guard, on camera, screwing in tiny screws while the stock market celebrates your patriotic sacrifice.”
Now, the logic has shifted. Not towards justice or redistribution, but towards enclosure. This is not a return to the New Deal, but the arrival of a new deal: nationalist capitalism, neo-mercantilism, the policing of borders and the disciplining of labour. It’s not that the system has repented; it has rearmed. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, and the rhetoric around reshoring, don’t signal an end to exploitation, they signal its repatriation.
What Lutnick describes is a vision of American life where work is plentiful but dehumanising, where jobs return stripped of protections, where the factory becomes a site not of dignity but of obedience. The screws are real and they’re tightening. You’re not just assembling tech now. You’re assembling the spectacle of American greatness, one repetitive motion at a time.
Neoliberalism made you redundant. Post-neoliberalism wants you back—tracked, surveilled, indebted, and too tired to protest.
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