This is not really true. Automation has served to replace jobs that were previously done by people but has almost always resulted in higher productivity and more employment rather than a net loss of jobs. Offshoring labor-intensive jobs to countries with dramatically lower labor costs definitely caused job losses that, which economically offset by cheap imported goods did impact wide swaths of the rural United States where manufacturing was a major industry. Manufacturers fought back by embracing automation, so it is true that most of those jobs aren’t coming back even if we enact protectionist policies, but it isn’t as if pre-NAFTA and Clinton granting China permanent “Most Favored Nation” trading status (essentially kicking off the globalist economy that caused China to become the dominant player in consumer product manufacturing) that companies were adopting automation just to reduce labor costs. If anything, what drove adoption of automation were labor unions, and Reagan breaking the back of the labor movement and allowing states to individually adopt broad “Right-to-Work” laws really retarded interest in investing in automation just for the sake of reducing labor costs.
As for neoliberalism leading to Trump winning the presidency in 2016, that is as pure of a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy as one could dream up. Setting aside that neoliberalism is not some kind of remotely coherent ideology the way “NeoConservatism” was but instead is really just an umbrella term for a bunch of different ideals (and @Cecil_Adams is correct that both the policies of the Clinton and GW Bush administrations fit equally under that shade, and with remarkably little policy distinction between them) about how the United States fits into and leads world both economically and politically, which are at odds with what other would-be or has-been superpowers think that role should be. It really has nothing to do with classical liberal ideals, or social progressivism, or anything else that might fall under the political banner of “liberalism”, and the consequences of economic globalism, while not perhaps entirely predictable, put the essential security and decision-making about critical elements of the domestic economy in foreign (and specifically the leadership of the Communist Party of China) hands.
That we are now in the situation where we cannot manufacture items critical to national security and public health like high performance microprocessors or melt-blown polypropylene masks is an inevitable consequence of that decision. Trumpism, on the other hand, is a populism movement fueled by long-simmering resentment that has just bubbled over because of the economic consequences (not just of globalism but deregulation of the banking industry, specifically with regard to mortgage and loans) but with roots that go back even before Reagan (who was definitely a “Trump Before Trump” in terms of rhetoric and disregard for laws he didn’t like) and straight to Barry Goldwater. The consequences of neoliberal political philosophy upon global trade may certainly have fed the tide of Trumpism but they were not the original cause that engendered it, and we were arguably coming to this point anyway, if not because of the 2007/8 mortgage crisis or loss of manufacturing jobs but because of the student debt crisis and demographic decline. If anything, we can expect more populist candidates (of which Bernie Sanders is most certainly one on the far-leftist side of the political spectrum) that continue to polarize by appealing to peoples’ fears and uncertainties about their place in the national economy.
Stranger