Politics & Power Quote by Marcy Kaptur

Kaptur’s line reads like a warning flare shot from the factory floor: the point isn’t just that imports are rising, it’s that the country is drifting into a kind of quiet dependency that feels un-American in the civic religion of self-reliance. By stacking the examples in escalating intimacy - “appliances, clothing, even food” - she moves from the discretionary to the existential. You can live without a new dishwasher; you cannot argue away the symbolism of importing dinner. That “even” does heavy work, turning trade statistics into a visceral breach of common sense.

The sentence structure is intentionally lopsided, almost breathless, mirroring the imbalance she’s describing. “More and more dependent” is less an economic term than a moral diagnosis: the fear that the U.S. is trading its productive capacity for cheapness and convenience, and that this bargain has political consequences. The subtext is about power. If you don’t make things, you don’t set terms; you absorb them. In a politician’s mouth, “foreign manufacturers” also quietly stands in for the offshoring decisions of American firms, but the rhetorical target is external because it’s easier to rally against.

The “first time in its history” claim is doing constituency work: it makes a structural shift sound like a line you can’t uncross. Contextually, it fits an early-2000s-to-2010s anxiety cycle - deindustrialization, China’s manufacturing ascent, and farm-state unease about consolidation and volatility. It’s economics framed as sovereignty, designed to make trade feel less like policy and more like fate.