To better illustrate how regionalization might take fuller shape, Foroohar surveys a handful of newer firms in agriculture, textiles, 3-D printing, and beyond. Each of these companies, she contends, are capable of creating sustainable growth. Plenty, a high-tech innovator of vertical farming, for example, could contribute to domestic food security; ICON, which Foroohar writes is already building concrete homes via an industrial printer, could eventually provide mass housing, in turn shaving the enormous carbon emissions currently produced by the housing sector’s global supply chains.
These forms of entrepreneurship, Foroohar believes, create more social value than financialized markets and provide an illustration of the benefits of what she calls “stakeholder capitalism.” Accordingly, while she has faith that some capitalists can be agents of social (not just technological) progress, Foroohar recognizes that regionalization cannot succeed without popular support.
The main deficit of Homecoming concerns how this popular support comes about, and how it might ensure regionalization actually benefits the working class. While Foroohar is sympathetic to trade unions and adeptly summarizes how neoliberal policies have harmed workers, she lacks a fleshed-out account of the social forces that are needed to bring about the egalitarian changes she envisages.
In her vision of economic resilience, coordination between state and industry takes precedence. (It is unsurprising that German corporatism and Mittelstand manufacturers are frequently invoked by Foroohar as positive models for cooperation between US industry and labor.) How the working class shapes this purported renewal of democratic capitalism — and wins major social reforms that complement regionalization — is mostly absent from her discussion.
As it happens, the neoliberal era shows how labor could again end up on the margins of a major shift in political economy. During the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, global capital favored major metropolitan areas with a concentration of financial services, increasingly upscale real estate, burgeoning tech firms, and highly educated populations. In the instances in which investment was not drawn to these financialized hubs, it trickled to the regions in the United States where labor standards are worst.
American Giant, a domestic clothing manufacturer that helped boost mask production in the early months of the pandemic, is, in Foroohar’s view, a bright spot among these patterns of uneven development. Like the other firms she profiles, it is meant to illustrate how regionalization might finally reduce the gap between peri-urban hinterlands and blue cities.
Foroohar depicts American Giant’s CEO Bayard Winthrop — a former Republican, she writes — as someone who wants to invest in his workforce and expand it. Yet one of the main reasons that Winthrop chose to base operations in North Carolina, Foroohar acknowledges, is because it is a right-to-work state. Regardless of Winthrop’s drive to build a reputable “Made in America” brand, the case reminds us that there is nothing intrinsic to regionalization that will fundamentally challenge capital’s power over investment and labor.
Still, Foroohar writes, American Giant, like many other manufacturers outside of the country’s major urban nodes of growth, needs more government intervention in the economy, from infrastructure spending to investment in vocational schools and training programs.
The problem for progressive forces is that while firms like American Giant that favor reshoring could be part of a “productivist” coalition, their priorities almost invariably constrict the horizon for social and economic change. This points to the dilemma facing the Biden administration. Even under the guidance of progressive policymakers, it is a legitimate worry that Biden’s industrial policies are geared too much toward capital and lack mechanisms to revive the wage growth that American workers experienced from 1940 to 1980. In the face of a Federal Reserve determined to slash inflation at all costs, the policies behind regionalization may be at once hobbled and severed from workers’ interests.
Other solutions that Foroohar believes could lead to a more equitable economy, such as data unions, will prompt debate. One of the chief concerns of the socialist movement since the nineteenth century has been fighting for freedom from market relations, not just full employment for the sake of greater political and economic power within the confines of liberal democracy. The idea of consumers earning rent from their personal data does not necessarily conjure up increased autonomy but rather the specter of penurious individuals further commodifying their lives to make ends meet.
More generally, despite the lengths Foroohar goes to impress upon readers that markets under regionalization will differ from those of neoliberalism, the distinction is not always clear. Foroohar’s confidence in public-private partnerships is the root of this ambiguity. Outside the few successful cases that she highlights, these types of partnerships — often in the form of small developmental corporations and community nonprofits — have usually struggled to deliver good jobs.
At times, Foroohar’s illustration of how regionalization might unfold unwittingly recalls the ideas of centrist Democrats in the early 1990s before they embraced NAFTA and financial deregulation. Given the almost unfathomable economic challenges that the climate crisis portends, this vision — even under the auspices of green industrial policy, such as those provisions for renewable energy in the Inflation Reduction Act — leaves much to be desired.
