These exhibitions were part of an expansive effort to pitch US-style capitalism to war-weary, communist-sympathetic Europeans. It was one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in American history: Thousands of visitors flooded in to catch a glimpse of a very foreign notion of modern life — first in Berlin, then across West Germany and Italy, and eventually in the USSR itself.
At the first Moscow exhibit in 1959, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev erupted in anger at his guide, then-vice-president Richard Nixon, over the display of American decadence. In the years following, Khrushchev tried to fight the propaganda not by opposing consumerism, but by embracing it in state media, promising that comparable Soviet products were already available or soon would be. (They weren’t and wouldn’t be.) The move backfired spectacularly, according to a 2005 article by historian Greg Castillo, validating America’s message about the superiority of capitalism as an economic system in the eyes of regular Soviets. “A runaway inflation of consumer desire ultimately bankrupted the political economy of Soviet-style socialism,” he wrote. Once the people see a dishwasher, they want a dishwasher.
Americans still want dishwashers — and iPhones and new sneakers and closets overflowing with clothes and rainbows of fruit and vegetables at the grocery store. The Marshall Plan’s pitch for “citizen enfranchisement through rising purchasing power,” as Castillo described it, was fine-tuned at home before it was deployed abroad, and it is still one of the primary animating principles of America’s identity — and its economy.
Today, household consumer spending constitutes almost 70% of the US GDP, the highest proportion for any industrialised nation. Supplying this bounty has required massive development of production capacity around the globe. Although Americans consistently express a preference for American-made goods in surveys, their actual purchasing habits have demonstrated for decades that affordability and abundance trump any ideological preference for domestic manufacturing when it comes time to buy.
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For almost a century, leaders from both parties have worked in concert to ensure that the import-fed firehose of consumer convenience continues to gush. Getting in between Americans and their stuff has long been one of the third rails of American politics — for the rare few who have tried, even with the best of intentions, the efforts have ended poorly enough to act as a warning to those who would come after them. (President Jimmy Carter, for example, lectured the public on the virtues of thrift. It did not go well.)
Team Trump seems not to care. “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the Economic Club of New York in March, dismissing widespread fears (though seemingly confirming them in substance) that the administration’s draconian tariff regime would lead to price hikes and shortages of all manner of imported goods.
As a matter of historical fact, Bessent is wrong, though most Americans probably agree with him on some level, if only because the notion is not maximally flattering. President Donald Trump campaigned on making consumer goods cheaper — “Starting on Day 1, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods,” he told a crowd at a Montana rally in August 2024.
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If Trump pushes forward on policies that are all but guaranteed to deliver another blow to Americans’ purchasing power, he will be daring Americans to reconsider what prosperity actually means — a forced reflection that, at the very least, could come at potentially great cost to his party in next year’s midterm elections. Investors, who do not have to wait till November 2026 to cast their vote, have already sent financial markets plunging, convinced that Trump’s trade moves will provoke a recession.
Consumerism has always been used toward political ends. When the consumer system emerged in the latter half of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution had kicked off a broad reordering of society in the US: People began to migrate in droves to cities to take jobs at factories, banks, newspapers and beyond. Regulations on corporate activity loosened, and private companies grew more numerous, larger and more powerful. An extravagantly wealthy class of industrialists emerged, as did a new middle class of office workers.
New classes create new class politics. America’s robber barons, with their habits of buying off politicians and violently breaking strikes, had a worse reputation problem than today’s billionaires. The industrialists, though, had a bargaining chip: affordable consumer goods. Factories could churn out a dazzling array of products at a scale and speed previously unthinkable, and urban office workers, who made more money and had more leisure time than their counterparts in factories, made ideal buyers for these goods.
Working in league with the owners of the country’s burgeoning department stores, industrialists pitched consumption to white-collar workers as proof that the wealthy were looking out for the little guy, too. “It was in their interest to give the impression that they, not their employees or other workers, were the true populists and that consumption, not production, was the new domain of democracy,” wrote the historian William Leach in his 1993 book, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture.
In return for consumer abundance, many middle-class Americans would take business and political leaders’ word for it when they said that the government was expensive and wasteful and that the social safety net needed to be kept lean to discourage laziness and freeloading. In return, their taxes would be low and, if they worked hard, the power of consumerism would provide the opportunity to buy whatever they wanted or needed — no bureaucrat would choose how to spend their money for them.
As a result, we have things like affordable dishwashers and effective in-home clothes dryers — the kind of stuff that’s still far less common in Europe, where people broadly settled on a more moderate version of this bargain with capitalists — but no guarantee of basic health care or paid sick leave. Trading universal health insurance for a shot at one day renovating your own big, beautiful American kitchen with all the bells and whistles is not a deal that everyone born into the US economic system is glad their forebears made, but you can plausibly call it a trade.
What the Trump administration instituted — and later delayed for most trade partners, with the notable exception of China — in April with its so-called Liberation Day tariffs is not a trade; it is a sacrifice, especially given that Republicans in Congress are weighing cuts to the country’s existing social safety net.
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Washington is withdrawing a century-old deal but offering nothing material to replace it. Even if the tariffs do succeed in eventually luring manufacturing jobs back to America — an outcome that most economists and industrial experts do not believe will ever materialise — any upside would be many years down the road. In the interim, millions of people will see their household budgets severely squeezed.
There is already a simmering rage among Americans about the affordability of everything from eggs to healthcare to housing, which seemed to play a not-insignificant role in propelling Trump back into the White House by strengthening his support among lower-income voters.
Every indication suggests that the cohort in particular is set to see its spending power kneecapped. Beyond that, many economists have warned that the combination of Trump’s trade, immigration and government-spending policies could tip the economy into a recession, leaving millions of Americans vulnerable to losing their jobs.
But the material impact of these changes is not the only issue at hand. Americans, perhaps more than any other group of people in the world, imagine themselves through their consumer identity.
Like it or not, our purchasing decisions are how we are taught to construct our sense of self, to communicate our values, to assert our agency. Historically, this has made life easier for political leaders: People who feel most comfortable expressing themselves through consumer choice are less likely to express themselves in other, potentially more troublesome ways. Taking a hammer to those choices may very well inspire some of them to consider other options. — Bloomberg Businessweek
