“Our politicians are stupid,” Donald
Trump said last August, at the first GOP presidential debate. “And the
Mexican government is much smarter, much sharper, much more cunning.”
He was talking about
immigration policy, but over the last several months, Trump has applied the
same logic and language to trade deals.
He has plenty of material to
work with. Between 1993 and 2013, more than 850,000 jobs were displaced by the
growing trade deficit with Mexico, according to a report by
the Economic Policy Institute.
“Prominent economists and US
government officials predicted that the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) would lead to growing trade surpluses with Mexico and that hundreds of
thousands of jobs would be gained,” the report’s author, Robert E. Scott,
wrote. “The evidence shows that the predicted surpluses in the wake of NAFTA's
enactment in 1994 did not materialize.”
To say the least.
Opposition to “free trade” has
become so closely tied to Bernie Sanders and the Left that it’s easy to
underestimate the hostility aimed at NAFTA, China and now the Trans-Pacific
Partnership within some segments of the Right. But it’s there, simmering, and
it is dividing the GOP’s grassroots base from the party’s traditional power
structures and ideology.
Consider Infowars, the
influential right-wing website maintained by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. It
published
a piece in 2014 listing 20 ways NAFTA is “destroying the economy.” The
author noted that, under NAFTA, the U.S. trade deficit had ballooned from about
$30 billion to $177 billion. He added that “Barack Obama has been negotiating a
secret treaty which would send the deindustrialization of America into
overdrive. The formal name of this secret agreement is ‘the Trans-Pacific
Partnership,’ and it would ultimately result in millions more good jobs being
sent to the other side of the planet where it is legal to pay slave labor
wages.”
That critique sounds a lot
like what the Left has said about the TPP, of course. But there is also, on the
Left, a recognition
that pitting U.S. workers against foreign workers is ultimately
counterproductive, and that we need not only better trade deals but a labor
movement and living-wage standards that transcend national borders.
Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric
is, by contrast, part of a broad nativist platform, and his success at winning
the states most devastated by deindustrialization will probably determine
whether he wins in November. In Ohio alone, nearly 300,000
manufacturing jobs have disappeared since NAFTA became law in 1994.
Manufacturing jobs accounted for nearly 24 percent of all private sector jobs
in the state at the time. They’re now 15 percent.
The winner in Ohio has won the
presidency in all but two elections since 1896. (It went for Thomas Dewey in
1944 and Richard Nixon in 1960.) Ohio is “more reflective of the national
average than any other state,” as Kyle Kondik, author of The Bellwether: Why
Ohio Picks the President, has
noted, and it is “home to members of many different American cultural and
political tribes, but it is dominated by none of them.”
Several of the most recent
polls show the race in Ohio is tied.
Hillary Clinton, for her part,
has partially
disowned her husband’s legacy on trade, telling United Auto Workers
president Dennis Williams that she would renegotiate NAFTA if elected. She has
also changed course on TPP. As secretary of state, she called
it “cutting-edge” and “innovative.” She now claims to oppose it, even as
President Obama aggressively promotes it. As he
said in a press conference this week: “Right now, I’m president and I’m for
it, and I think I’ve got the better argument.”
Whatever her actual intentions
regarding NAFTA and TPP, though, Clinton seems incapable of acting as if she
grasps the plight of people who’ve been left behind by the globalizing,
greening economy. In a town-hall meeting in Columbus, Ohio, in March, she
said that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out
of business.” Mindful that she should at least gesture toward empathy, Clinton
dutifully added that “we don’t want to forget those people.” The only soundbite
that most voters heard, though, was Clinton promising to put coal miners out of
work.
The cold political calculation
might be that Clinton simply doesn't need white working-class voters to win the
election, and thus isn't all that concerned with reaching out to them. New York
Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ presumptive leader in the Senate when Harry
Reid retires after the current term, reflected
this logic recently.
“For every blue-collar
Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania,” he said, “we will pick up two
moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in
Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
Given that reasoning, it's not
surprising that white working-class voters would give their loyalty to a
candidate who at least acts like he gets it. As a writer for the Toledo Blade recently
observed, “The once well-lighted towns of Ohio that have been turned into
Appalachian basket cases have no lobby. No Marshall Plan is proposed for them.
Their plight is not covered on the evening news. But they have Trump.”
With his steady output of
outrage, Trump has often been his own worst enemy over the past year. But for
Democrats, the primaries should be a reality check about the growing skepticism
toward their recent trade agenda and about the unpredictability of the
electorate. Clinton won the Democratic primary in Ohio by about 14 points. But
in neighboring Michigan, where manufacturing jobs in the private sector have
fallen from nearly 24 percent of the economy to 16 percent since 1994, Sanders’
economic populism delivered a remarkable upset. Several polls put Clinton’s
lead at more than 20 points right up to election day. No poll had it at less
than 5 percent. The Sanders victory there was
“stunning,” as the website FiveThirtyEight put it.
In Columbus, Ohio, this week,
during a news cycle dominated by Trump’s feud with the family of a Muslim
solider killed in Iraq, Humayun Khan, Trump ignored that controversy and
focused on economics, telling the crowd that “Hillary Clinton’s disastrous
trade policies are responsible for the manufacturing job losses in Ohio.” NAFTA,
he said, is a “bad, bad, bad deal.” But “I take bad deals and make ‘em
great.”
Trump would almost certainly
not honor that promise if elected. But will Clinton’s history of supporting
“bad, bad, bad” trade deals be his trump card in November? That would be
striking, but also—given the simmering disquiet across the heartland and the
volatility of this political moment—not all that surprising.
Theo Anderson, an In These
Times staff writer, is writing a book about the historical and contemporary
influence of pragmatism on American politics. He has a Ph.D. in American
history from Yale University and teaches history and literature seminars at the
Newberry Library in Chicago.
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