A quick break from the heavily online - I’m in The Dispatch today, arguing that with the GOP’s turn against free trade it’s more important than ever for Democrats to reject protectionism and tariffs.
Be back tomorrow with more social media analysis!
For decades, the working consensus in American politics was that free trade was good. Every Republican presidential nominee from Gerald Ford to Mitt Romney supported agreements to expand and liberalize international trade. Democrats have historically been a bit more reluctant, but their most successful presidents of the last 50 years—Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—both championed free trade and pursued large, multilateral trade agreements. Both the vote to create NAFTA in 1993 and the vote to grant China permanent normal trade relations passed on a bipartisan basis.
That changed in 2016. Hillary Clinton broke with the Obama administration to oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership, and Donald Trump tore up the GOP’s traditional views on trade to promote heavily protectionist, anti-trade policies. Trump withdrew from the TPP on his first day in office, and he was the first president in generations to significantly raise America’s tariff level. Joe Biden rolled back some of Trump’s first-term tariffs, such as those on steel and aluminum from Europe, but he left many others in place. And in his second term, Trump has imposed a universal 10 percent tariff on all goods from all countries, announced a wide variety of higher tariffs on specific countries and categories, and even eliminated the de minimis exception for small packages—that $40 T-shirt you bought from Canada now gets a tariff. Tariff levels in 2025 have skyrocketed to levels we haven’t seen since the 1940s.
Economists say Trump’s tariffs are causing economic chaos—higher prices, slower growth, and increased uncertainty with Trump’s frequent changes. And yet, Democrats haven’t come out forcefully for the idea of free trade. Why?
Read the full piece over at The Dispatch…
