By Wayne Allensworth
If one knows even a little recent history, watching the legacy media, Democrats, and establishment Republicans melt down over the “Trump tariffs” has been amusing. Just take a look at Representative Nancy Pelosi speaking in 1996 on the unfairness of China’s tariff policy. She’s got charts, comparative rates, the whole nine yards, and she seemed to be reading from a script later picked up by Donald Trump:
Look around a little bit and you will find former President Barack Obama touting tariffs on China. Senator Chuck Schumer supported Joe Biden’s continuing tariffs on Chinese goods that were instituted by Donald Trump during his first term. Even former President Ronald Reagan, a big supporter of “free trade,” used tariffs to save Harley Davidson, the last producer of motorcycles in America, when Japanese motorcycles that were flooding the American market threatened the revered American brand. Reagan’s supporters backed the president’s insistence that “free trade” must be “fair trade.” If America opened markets, our trade partners had to reciprocate. This is not difficult to comprehend. And Harley Davidson boomed afterwards. What’s more, tariffs provide manufacturers that offshore the incentive to reshore if they want to sell goods here. Reagan also imposed tariffs on Japanese electronics. Our country is running an untenable trade deficit of more than a trillion dollars.
Ideology is the enemy of common sense and pragmatism. Idealogues love their theories and continue backing them even if they damage the country. Reagan was a free trader but not a hidebound idealogue. He thought it important to counter unfair trade practices and did not let The Wall Street Journal’s brand of capitalist ideology stand in the way. I’ve heard it said by dogmatic free traders that tariffs are supported by “special interests” to protect themselves at the expense of consumers. I can’t think of a better example of an economic dogma more fervently professed and often stridently stated. People who believe such things are not necessarily bad or callous, but like so many of us, they find comfort in a reductionist worldview that explains everything simplistically. They want a checklist that disregards context, circumstances, and the common interests and bonds that make a nation. They want a bloodless, unreflective commandment. That attitude reflects the “Economic Man” view of society, nations, and humanity. I doubt that China’s trade policy, which piggybacked on American free trade ideology, was based exclusively on the narrow interests of a few Chinese fat cats. China became an industrial powerhouse and a world power with a global reach as “free” traders enthusiastically watched American companies offshore their plants to take advantage of cheap labor and a lack of regulations (regarding over-regulation, there is a lesson in there for us). The free-trade ideologues claimed that greedy American workers made too much money. American wages had to come down to the level of China, Bangladesh or Thailand for the American corporation — not nation, not homeland — to “compete” in the global regime they envisioned.
Globalism came out of its closet in the 1990s. The late globalist paragon and former Wall Street Journal editorial page editor, Bob Bartley, declared to Peter Brimelow that the nation state was finished. Our country, he and the globalists claimed, was obsolete. Unsurprisingly, Bartley supported open borders. For him, the North American Free Trade Agreement was just the beginning of the merger of its participants and the end of the United States as an independent country. In a July 2001 editorial, Bartley stated plainly, with all the hubris and arrogance such a statement entailed, that there should be a new “commandment”: “There shall be open borders.” In the early 90s, Ross Perot warned us about the “giant sucking sound” that would signal the departure of American jobs when NAFTA took shape. That’s to say nothing of bringing in masses of immigrants, legal and otherwise, to drive down wages, which three-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan warned against.
The proof is in the pudding, and the results are in. In the 10 years following China’s admittance to the low-tariff World Trade Organization, the United States lost 25 percent of its manufacturing workforce. Writing for The Federalist, Roger G. Brooks explained that America lost 4 million relatively high wage jobs, “triggering untold downstream losses of non-manufacturing jobs in our former manufacturing communities.” That created a wasteland in the once industrial powerhouse of the American heartland. Hopelessness, drug addiction, “deaths of despair,” including suicides and drug overdoses, family breakdown, declining life expectancy, and ghost towns were the result. The great ladder of social mobility that manufacturing had provided for the working class was gone. The big winners were the “1%” and the managerial state with its welfare programs, social workers, and the like, managing the chaos the state itself had created, as is often the case. Oh, and the rest of us could get a cheaper flat screen TV at Walmart. Free-trade dogma became practically non-negotiable among elites. Again, we must note that Senator Bernie Sanders once opposed mass immigration and defended the nation state as part of his pro-labor leftist stance. As a Vermont senator, he said, his first obligation was to his American constituents:
Apparently, Sanders is no longer so concerned about the wellbeing of Vermont’s working class. Glenn Greenwald, himself a principled leftist, also noted the left’s former anti-free trade position, as the left saw it as harmful to working people and the poorest Americans. “It seems odd,” said Greenwald, for the left to “reflexively” oppose Trump’s tariffs. Greenwald also noted that labor leader Cesar Chavez once opposed mass immigration as damaging to labor.
As Brooks wrote, we have attempted to “soothe our consciences” about the destruction of the industrial heartland with government handouts and subsides, but none of that can replace the dignity of a well-paying job, the self-respect and sense of purpose that real humans, not economic widgets in a vast machine, need to flourish. A nation where that is once again possible would be a more stable, humane, and closer-knit country. We are not merely “consumers” or “workers,” or interchangeable parts in a vast common market. We are Americans, part of a nation that respects the common good. That, in part, is what patriotism means; a sense of the common good.
Tariffs can benefit the nation for two chief reasons. First, as leverage to open foreign markets to American goods. Second, to protect basic industries — such as steel and automobiles — that are essential to maintaining an industrial base and our national sovereignty. Build it here and you can sell it here. During the Covid-19 period, for the first time, many Americans learned that our country had grown dangerously dependent on a rival great power, China, for everything from pharmaceuticals to equipping our armed forces. No responsible government can tolerate that situation. The globalists will screech that we will pay more for some goods. But what kind of price did we pay socially, strategically, and spiritually for dismissing the industrial heartland as the “Rust Belt” and telling our fellow Americans to “learn to code,” or as one globalist wag put it, that their hometowns deserved to die since they were economically unviable in a globalized economy? We ask our military personnel to risk life and limb, many of them from those once proud industrial strongholds. We may speak ever so disingenuously about making sacrifices for the common good. But in this case, we are supposed to ignore the suffering and degeneracy of fellow Americans whom we expect to be willing to sacrifice for us. The left groans about the plight of minorities. But what the hell do they think happened to drive so many minority communities into such degradation? Without the social mobility ladder of good manufacturing jobs, minorities and the white working class will be stuck as a forever underclass, one the Davos crowd once told us would not own anything and would not have jobs — at least full time jobs — but would be “happy” in the Brave New World to come with a new Universal Basic Income to survive.
The “Trump tariffs” are fiercely opposed precisely because they are another blow to globalization, something the left once opposed. It once championed the working class. But as the left morphed into limousine liberals, they subsequently found the working class uncouth and unworthy of the managerial class’s sense of superiority — it’s right to rule. Ideology in the form of a neo-conservative/neo-liberal globalist consensus has possessed our elites and blinded them to any sense of responsibility for the nation as a whole, as a coherent and cohesive people willing to look out for one another. Trade policy is a tool to be wielded pragmatically for the common good, not a collection of dogmas reflexively imposed. It is not an end in and of itself. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives have at times supported tariffs for pragmatic reasons. A number of countries have reached out to open negotiations with the Trump administration on trade. The European Union is ready to negotiate with the US.
Globalism envisions a world of atomized consumers in a borderless, economically and bureaucratically managed Blob, a world bereft of real communities or any sense of responsibility to our countrymen. It is a world without the traditional sense of a hierarchy of obligation that acknowledges limits and decries hubris. The globalists’ world is one without humanity or the very real ties that make life meaningful.
There will be a period of adjustment, uncertainty, and market volatility, coupled with maneuvering and negotiations by the Trump Administration. Let’s give this time, and hope for the best. Legacy media are trying to induce a panic, but massive trade deficits cannot go on. Much of the most hysterical screaming about the tariffs likely has little to do with history or economic policy. Trump Derangement Syndrome is an epidemic that blinds otherwise reasonable people to reality or pragmatic thinking. Something isn’t necessarily bad just because Trump did it.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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