Trade, the Left, and Trump

While working in Washington during the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, I was part of an effort to build a bipartisan coalition to reform American trade policy; or more precisely, formulate one. International trade was an issue that cut across party lines. Presidents of both parties favored "trade promotion" as an end in itself. Post-Cold War "globalists" -- backed by "transnational" corporations, persuaded them that the creation of social networks unencumbered by borders was the wave of the future. With "history at an end" there were no more security concerns to hem in markets or business dealings. And the old classical liberal notion that trade generated peace was given new life.

As a conservative, I knew whatever one said about history, things were going to continue to happen in recognizable ways. Bill Clinton proclaimed in 1998 that the Great Powers were no longer competing for wealth and territory. It was a doubtful claim at the time and is clearly not how to think of world affairs today. My part of the trade policy coalition was composed of national security Republicans. They did not want to see the outsourcing of strategic supply chains overseas which would make our defense industrial base vulnerable to disruption while transferring technology to rivals like China. Our partners on the left were labor Democrats who did not want to see American workers lose their jobs as factories closed in the Heartland. Mounting trade deficits meant that American money was not only creating jobs overseas but also building and sustaining industrial capacity that empowered the ambitions of foreign adversaries.

Winston Churchill warned against "building German industry with British and American money" when it would empower the Nazi regime; a warning equally valid for a China still run by the Communist Party.

There was a time when Republicans weren't Free Traitors™.

Pre WWII platform:

The Tariff

We reaffirm our belief in the protective tariff to extend needed protection to our productive industries. We believe in protection as a national policy, with due and equal regard to all sections and to all classes. It is only by adherence to such a policy that the well being of the consumers can be safeguarded that there can be assured to American agriculture, to American labor and to American manufacturers a return to perpetrate American standards of life. A protective tariff is designed to support the high American economic level of life for the average family and to prevent a lowering to the levels of economic life prevailing in other lands.

In the history of the nation the protective tariff system has ever justified itself by restoring confidence, promoting industrial activity and employment, enormously increasing our purchasing power and bringing increased prosperity to all our people.

The tariff protection to our industry works for increased consumption of domestic agricultural products by an employed population instead of one unable to purchase the necessities of life. Without the strict maintenance of the tariff principle our farmers will need always to compete with cheap lands and cheap labor abroad and with lower standards of living.

The enormous value of the protective principle has once more been demonstrated by the emergency tariff act of 1921 and the tariff act of 1922.

We assert our belief in the elastic provision adopted by congress in the tariff act of 1922 providing for a method of readjusting the tariff rates and the classifications in order to meet changing economic conditions when such changed conditions are brought to the attention of the president by complaint or application.

We believe that the power to increase or decrease any rate of duty provided in the tariff furnishes a safeguard on the one hand against excessive taxes and on the other hand against too high customs charges.

The wise provisions of this section of the tariff act afford ample opportunity for tariff duties to be adjusted after a hearing in order that they may cover the actual differences in the cost of production in the United States and the principal competing countries of the world.

We also believe that the application of this provision of the tariff act will contribute to business stability by making unnecessary general disturbances which are usually incident to general tariff revisions.

"In the past, opposition to "free trade" among Republicans was the minority position despite the fact that the GOP had been born as the party of protection and had dominated politics during the growth of the U.S. into the world's largest manufacturing power from the Civil War through World War I. As the "arsenal of democracy" the U.S. won World War II and the Cold War. By recognizing the return of Great Power rivalry, President Trump has pulled the GOP back from the extreme laissez-faire attitude it had succumbed to during the fleeting post-Cold War euphoria. The actions taken to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and to end China's plunder of American technology have been based on national security concerns about sustaining a domestic industrial base capable of underpinning American preeminence in global politics.

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