When Austin Bishop and Blake Seitz were writing ARC's paper on Reindustrialization, the idea was a dream. Now it is at the heart of the US policy agenda, and this week @AustinBishop is convening the @ReindSummit to make the idea a reality. 🧵 (1/5)

(2/5) In the second in our new series of ARC Research Twitter exclusives, @AustinBishop explains the ideas driving the Reindustrialize movement. There is some debate between our British and American friends about whether this should be 'Reindustrialize' or 'Reindustrialise'. As a consummate British gentleman, editor @BenedictRogers pulled rank... Read: 'Reindustrialise: Building Capacity, Security, and Prosperity in a De-globalising World' at the link below 👇

(3/5) The argument at the heart of their paper is: The West has outsourced its ability to make and build, leaving us vulnerable to security threats and gutting our industrial heartlands. We need to reindustrialise in order to flourish in the coming multipolar era. Austin Bishop and Blake Seitz argue that our world is fracturing along geopolitical lines. The globalist dream is unravelling, and we are being confronted with our inability to produce the goods our economies need. At the same time, once great hubs of industrial innovation are now lying in decay. Young men and women are growing up with no prospects of steady employment or contribution to society. In both cases, the answer is to reindustrialise, and learn to build again.

(4/5) They tell the story of Cleveland, a quintessential rust belt town that came to rival the great cities of London, Paris, and St. Petersburg, home to half of the world’s millionaires at the height of the Gilded Age. They describe the great industrialists—Rockerfeller, Mather, and Ford—who made their fortunes in manufacturing, logistics, and resource extraction, but where the proceeds from industry were transformed into civilisation: Ford in particular, was motivated by a patriotism that would feel alien to the corporate executive of today, with an intense desire to “spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes.” Birmingham, the birthplace of the steam engine, was the workshop of the British Empire, and after the Second World War, boasted one of the lowest unemployment rates and highest wage levels in the country. But today, in both cities and across the West, malaise has taken its toll. Deindustrialisation has not only devastated our former industrial heartlands, but has undermined national strength, economic stability, and social cohesion. The authors trace this unravelling to two major forces: overregulation and globalisation. Beginning in the 1960s, a web of environmental and bureaucratic constraints strangled new industrial projects. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberal economic theory that championed financial abstraction, global supply chains, and shareholder primacy drove capital and talent away from the world of atoms and into the world of bits, leaving the West falling behind its new geostrategic rival and manufacturing powerhouse, China. This is a call to rebuild the real economy of the West: to recover not just jobs, but the spirit of civic-industrial partnership that once made us rich, free, and strong. If cities like Cleveland and Birmingham are to recover their former glory, it will take a reordering of our economic priorities and bold investment to build once again.

(5/5) Why does this matter right now? Because the world order as we have known it is being shaken. We can no longer rely on friends and hostile actors alike to supply us with the building blocks for our material lives. What we do not know how to produce, we may soon come to be without. We also owe this to our citizens who have been left without dignified work and opportunities in the homelands they love. We must rebuild these communities as places where all people can thrive and contribute to the society around them.

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