The Capital Times Editorial Board, sworn enemies of the state Department of Commerce, recently issued a strong statement condemning them for not preventing the closing of Briggs & Stratton’s Jefferson plant. The editorial comes very close to accusing Commerce of desiring a post-industrial, post-manufacturing economy in Wisconsin, exercising benign neglect until that reality is achieved. If more protectionist measures are not taken soon, they predict ominously, “get ready to shut the book on Wisconsin’s history as a manufacturing state.”  Problem is, that book has been shutting for a long time. It just took this recession to flip over the last pages.   

Since the American left — let alone the Madison left — remains so compulsively-ignorant about economics, it is unsurprising to watch the left squirm uncertainly during times of economic crisis, torn between suddenly-contradictory impulses. On the one hand, liberals want to be friends to the working class, to “look for the union label,” to fight for the little guy. But on the other, liberals have always assumed the special responsibility of imagining alternate, more creative social frameworks. Thus for many serious young liberals — the kind who don’t really ever think about AFSCME et al. — being progressive involves at least a symbolic discomfort with wage labor generally. Thus, even if Madison liberals recoil at a Department of Commerce that doesn’t intervene to save dying industries, among the younger crowds there is genuine progressive delight to see such an uncreative economic era passing away.  

If you are reading this column, you are likely a college student at UW, and you likely didn’t know about the Briggs & Stratton plant closing in Jefferson. You will never work in a Briggs and Stratton plant. You will probably never work a single day of rigorous manual labor in your lives.  At least 75 percent of you have no idea what a ‘tool and die maker’ is. You belong to the most educated generation in American history. You live more comfortable, less strenuous lives than 99.9% of humanity before you.  You probably have friends from high school who do have manufacturing jobs, but they have drifted to the far perimeters of your Facebook friends circle. You exist in a different America than the working class does. If you feel momentary guilt on this account, it will pass as quickly as a Sunday-morning hangover in Madison.    

And, of course, you voted for Barack Obama. You are the reason why American liberalism and American labor are no longer exactly the same thing.    

But — and this is the crucial part — this is not your fault. Many say you live in a bubble, but you are but actors in a changing world order over which you never had any control.  And eventually, of course, that bubble will expand until it becomes the norm. You see, the Capital Times neglects to register that the demise of manufacturing is not the fault of the Department of Commerce or Fortune 500 CEO’s or the “free-market” decisions they malign. We have been on a crash course towards this brave new world for decades. It’s called the Information Age, soon to partner with the Green Age. There are days when I wonder whether the Wall Street excesses that caused this recession weren’t just the inevitable self-flagellations which accompany any period of change and uncertainty. Does this excuse the Bernard Madoffs and the Citigroups of the world? Hardly. But if the manufacturing age has been brought to a grinding halt, the recession only succeeded in hastening something inevitable. The Department of Commerce, then, has no responsibility to protect Wisconsin as a “manufacturing state” — only to ease the transition into a new economy.  

Here’s the bitter truth, too: If you’re anything like the college students to which I alluded before, you are very happy to have dodged the chains of the working class. People used to be patriotic about manufacturing in the United States. Our generation is patriotic about gay marriage and Facebook. And now pursuing the American dream, in no small way, means arranging your life to minimize the possibility of ever having to manufacture a damn thing. I remember my ninth-grade social studies teacher, who gave extra credit to any student who would tour the toilet factory in Kohler, WI. He never said why. When I came back from the three-hour tour, I got it: I was being conditioned to avoid work like that at all costs. And so, not without some shame, I have indeed.  

Thus there will be nobody in our generation to step up to defend the Briggs & Stratton’s of the world, for even the millennials’ working class will be engaged in more substantive and creative work than the assembly lines of industrial society. Perhaps this is why the Capital Times insists upon beating the drums of the industrial age as long as possible before we have all gone deaf to them. It’s not really that the drums of the industrial age are breaking. They will always be there to fall back upon, but they’re no longer the best song on the radio. If we haven’t yet found newer, more creative instruments to play, we are at least working on it. And we are, for better or worse, not going back.