What’s worse for innovation: MAGA or Mao?

PITY THE young, for the world is run by old men. President Donald Trump (79) and China’s ruler, Xi Jinping (72), talk a good game about AI, robots and other futuristic marvels. Deep down, though, both have a nostalgia for the 1950s.

Mr Trump’s broad longing for lost greatness is no secret: he has it embroidered on hats. But in quite specific ways, his definition of the good life reflects conditions that prevailed in the years after his birth in 1946. When Mr Trump last month pledged to “permanently pause” migration from “third-world countries”, he accused America’s 51m foreign-born residents of bringing high crime and urban decay, and of overwhelming schools, hospitals, the housing supply and government finances. Such social dysfunction “did not exist after world war II”, Mr Trump claimed.

Actually, 1950s America saw its share of panics about social breakdown, as when experts warned that comic books were causing teenage delinquency. What is true is that Mr Trump grew up in an unusually homogenous country. In Mr Trump’s youth the native-born share of the population approached 95% (it is around 85% today). Strict immigration controls were harshly enforced until the mid-1960s, when the rules were loosened. In 1954 a federal campaign, derisively named Operation Wetback, deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican farm workers and labourers without the right papers. Mr Trump has praised this as a model.

The 1950s set baselines for MAGA’s economic worldview, too. By the end of the second world war, America accounted for some 60% of global manufacturing output, as Japan, Europe and others lay in ruins. When Mr Trump announced “Liberation Day” tariffs to protect car workers, steelmakers, shipbuilders and farmers, he not only charged foreign governments with stealing jobs. He named industries that “we used to dominate”, vowing to bring that “golden age” back. In several of those sectors, the 1950s indeed marked a high point of American dominance.

The 1950s—or a campy pastiche of it—even informs the MAGA aesthetic. Mr Trump’s Labour Department recently unveiled a policy that makes it harder to hire skilled foreigners. Their promotional campaign involved 1950s-style images of young American men with lustrous hair, in settings worthy of a Norman Rockwell painting. These images of happy workers bear the slogan “Restoring the American Dream!”

Governance in Mr Xi’s China is a more grimly serious business. Still, nostalgia for the mid-20th century lurks there, too. At first sight, this is odd. The years following Mr Xi’s birth in 1953 were bitter ones. Under Chairman Mao, a revolutionary zealot, the People’s Republic seized farms from landlords, confiscated businesses, sent “volunteers” to fight in the Korean war and embarked on the Great Leap Forward, a catastrophic campaign to transform China from an agrarian society into a modern industrial one.

Today, Mr Xi’s China has taken an all-in bet on high technology and advanced manufacturing. To live in a big Chinese city, as this columnist did from 2018 to 2024, is to inhabit a world of gleaming modernity and dazzling, if at times sinister, digital wizardry.

Yet on a recent return visit to China and the region, The Telegram heard Chinese scholars ascribe Xi-era priorities to ideas from the 1950s. These start with the Communist Party’s reluctance to allow a greater proportion of national wealth to flow to households, via higher wages or less stingy welfare systems. Chinese leaders believe there is a trade-off between innovation and raising living standards, scholars sigh. Because party bosses are bent on achieving self-reliance, and on avoiding dependence on America, they are preparing for “a return to the 1950s”.

By that, scholars mean an absolute focus on collective success and China’s national strength, with less emphasis on fostering individual dreams or aspirations. Economic planners in the 1950s did not hide the sacrifices they were demanding. Rural peasants from collective farms had to contribute vast amounts of unpaid labour, whether tilling fields or building roads, dams and reservoirs by hand. Commodity prices were kept low to boost urban industries, following Mao’s directive to “prioritise capital accumulation over substantial improvements in people’s living conditions”.

In theory, China’s leaders take a different tack today. They acknowledge the need to boost domestic demand and consumer confidence. For all that, Chinese state capitalism is now a Darwinian death-match for many businesses, involving low wages, long hours and razor-thin margins. No matter if university graduates cannot find the white-collar careers of their dreams, the motherland’s interests come first. Mr Xi himself has growled that the young should be less “pampered”.

Nostalgia for the past goes beyond economic policies. To fight corruption and enforce political discipline Mr Xi has revived ideological tools from the 1950s. That time is now idealised as a simpler, purer age, when selfless party cadres fanned out across a vast country to serve the masses.

Whose version of nostalgia carries greater risks? Mr Xi is using 1950s notions of collective sacrifice to build a high-tech, low-carbon 21st-century economy. That is a gamble that repression and state planning can co-exist with innovation and social stability.

By contrast, Mr Trump promises supporters a 1950s economy, reopening shipyards, steel mills and coal mines. Calling climate change a scam, he has relaxed fuel-economy standards for cars. His transport secretary recently enthused that old-style station wagons may soon return, with “maybe a little wood panelling on the side”. Meanwhile, China is building flying electric cars.

MAGA is politics for a backward-looking country. If that proves a losing bet, Americans can blame the old man in charge. ■