The economy is always what it boils down to. Americans see factory work as hazard duty, and you can't exactly take untrained vagrants and put them on the construction site. If you want Americans to build you things, you have to pay them an American wage. Otherwise the market economy doesn't work. China isn't burdened by any of this, not because they're authoritarian but because their economy is planned. If they want to make cars domestically, it doesn't matter what Mexico charges for labor - whatever the state says, goes.

So instead of making some grand technocratic beneficial decisions, the decisions are mostly oriented towards keeping you in power. A power that is very fragile. At times that still might net sensible policies, but the same is true for democracies who have to deal with public opinion. Democracies have the benefit that even a mob (the public) has some capabilities for learning.

The solutions to domestic manufacturing would be solved completely differently in both countries because the problems are different. A large factor is simply labor costs for developed nations for example.

I don't think there is a solution aside from import/export taxes. If that is true, is Trump secretly a good president? Perhaps not, but you would need to come up with solutions yourself. A democracy where a public just demands solutions is ineffective, but so are most if not all more autocratically governed nations.