I live just outside the Rust Belt city of Syracuse, New York. And for the last two years, it’s been hard to avoid the topic on everybody’s mind: Micron. As part of Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act, $6.14bn in federal support has lured the chip manufacturer to the northern suburb of Clay. Barring repeal of one of President Biden’s main legislative achievements, Micron plans to invest $100bn to build four chip plants and create 9,000 direct jobs for our struggling city. But very few thought to thank Joe Biden for it, or the Democrats. As for the election results, in Syracuse’s Onondaga County, Kamala Harris received about 14,000 fewer votes than Biden in 2020 – a decline of 10 per cent. Many of the districts around Micron’s destination of Clay went to Trump.
Why this lack of gratitude from the American working class? The Biden administration made a commitment to revive manufacturing in order to return disaffected working-class voters to the Democratic fold. But they puzzlingly made very little effort to brand such investments as part of a political project to improve those people’s lives. As the left in America and the world still reels from this result, they should examine why their successes as well as their failures have been spurned by the working class.
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