Comment by nathan_compton

I think its more complicated than this. People don't want to work in factories per se, but what a world where labor has actual power. The big thing that offshoring did was strip the power of local labor to enforce certain reasonable conditions on employers and this allowed normal people to live stable, even comfortable lives.

Offshoring has produced a world where we can buy cheap trinkets but where many, many, americans live precariously, have little to no stability, and work more than one job to make ends meet. What Americans really want is more control over their lives and "bringing back manufacturing" is a sort of short-hand for that ideal.

I think bringing back some manufacturing may help, but in the end Americans need to learn that what they really want is more power to shape their lives and that they will need to wrest that power back from a system which has leaned ever more towards market control of the allocation of time, energy, and labor.