The OP asked why Trump’s protectionism is so popular and I posted reasons, attitudes and beliefs as I’ve heard them expressed for many years, going back even as far as the 50s and DeGaulle. Resentment toward Europe is not a new thing but it has ratcheted up the last couple of decades, and in my opinion this resentment lies at the heart of support for Trump’s anti-G7 stance.
You, of course, are free to suspect anything you like.
And you accuse me of silliness. :rolleyes: This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about when I warned the OP about asking for conservative motives on the Dope:
That’s all well and good, but outside the scope of the OP, which sought the reasons for Trump’s protectionism being popular and not a debate over the reasons themselves.
I would question whether the protectionism is broadly popular. The steel/aluminum tariffs poll at 31-50 and free trade agreements poll at 56-30. Only tariffs on China are popular which isn’t too surprising.
There is no question that protectionism has increased in popularity among Republicans and no doubt partisanship/tribalism plays some role. Beyond that, Trump did alter the composition of the Republican electorate a bit attracting some working class voters who were specifically drawn to his protectionism. But there has been no broad public shift towards protectionism.
Because too many American presidents have not appeared to put America first and Trump is vocal about doing so. It’s more apparent with incompetent leaders like May who are afraid to say no to a mouse, much less China. However, it’s all show. The key words are ‘appeared’ and ‘vocal’: Trump is all sound and fury, all bluster and blunder, rather than being quietly effective like Obama.
In the short term, jobs will come back to America; in the long term it will all come crashing down, as it did in 29/30. Does no one remember Smoot-Hawley?
Even in the short term the net gain is doubtful. Increasing tariffs on steel increases the prices for all consumers of steel, making them less competitive against foreign competitors whose finished products aren’t subject to tariffs, and potentially causing projects to be cancelled to due to reduced profitability.
Free trade is not popular with ordinary people, taken in a vacuum. That experiment is now being upset by Trump’s emergence as a or the key critic of free trade. A lot of ordinary people are now going to make friendlier noises about trade in polls etc…because they hate Trump. It wouldn’t too shocking either if some posts here are also more free trade oriented than the same posters might have made some years ago in the time after Democrats in Congress for the most part had turned against free trade, though Clinton and Obama weren’t protectionists (NAFTA passed on GOP votes over majority Democratic opposition in Congress and signed by Clinton).
Which isn’t entirely an accusation of hypocrisy. Trump’s arguments tend to put protectionism in a bad light if one knows anything about it. But the political coat tail effect is there also. In the other direction too. Some Republican voters formerly were at least tolerant of the party’s free trade position (if not enthusiastic) but are inspired by Trump being willing to ‘stand up to it’.
More importantly, it’s not as if everyone who believes their economic lot, and that of their communities, has been hurt by trade is imagining it or looking for an excuse for their ‘racism’ etc. The decline of job opportunities in some places is very much about trade. It’s also arguably a factor in growing economic equality, though in both employment and inequality it’s extremely difficult to separate trade per se from technology and social change. And it’s not good for the US or rest of the world necessarily that the US has such a large and persistent trade deficit overall. How to address those side effects and problems though is where populist nostrums on trade tend to run out of any rational value.
But there’s a real problem and particularly to some people. And populism is all about putting out solutions that seem simple. And again, it’s not like neo-protectionism is a Republican idea or even Trump’s alone. Many elected Democrats support the thrust of Trump’s trade policies, perhaps a higher % than among elected Republicans. They just don’t make it (and better not be caught by their primary base making it) look like they support Trump in general.
Because while free trade and trade in general leads to more efficient allocation of productive effort and thus increases wealth. The benefits are disproportionate. Those who aren’t benefiting as much even if personal absolute wealth is increasing tend to be disgruntled. Furthermore not all are even benefiting with an increase in absolute wealth. Some folks standards of living are decreasing.
The world hasn’t caught up to the fact that we may be leading to a situation of systemic surplus labor.
While I wouldn’t discount the positions that others have written about already, I think it’s worth saying that there is also the pro-business side of the Republican party, who voted for Trump on the basis that he was a hard-dealing, wheeling and dealing businessman.
For this sort of Republican, it’s less about protectionism as being the 800 pound gorilla and yet letting everyone walk all over you. Why would a smart gorilla do that? It makes no sense.
Whether true or not, Trump has made the argument that this is the state of America right now and he’s going out there and reviewing all of our arrangements with the rest of the world and reminding people that we are, in fact, the 800 pound gorilla and they’d better do what we say and give us everything we want.
There probably is some merit to this argument. Unfortunately, Trump is stupid and the things he’s doing are rather beside the point and about the worst way of going about the same task. In general, the media on the left is more concerned with Trump’s morality than his stupidity and the media on the right is more concerned with not challenging their viewers than pointing out to them that they voted for an idiot.
I would qualify that question by asking, popular with who? Sure, it’s popular with his disproportionately vocal base, as is almost everything else he does to cater to their adoration, for the reasons already stated: xenophobia, stupidity (specifically, in this case, a lack of understanding about the facts and economics of trade), and a general sense of “standing up to” a perceived adversary in what is falsely viewed as a zero-sum game. But it certainly isn’t popular with everyone, including a Republican Congress:
What outside aggression ? Zee Germans ? And what communists ? You do realize the world has changed a smidge since the 60s, right ?
Do you ? I didn’t know the EU had a Monthly Sneerletter adressed to every citizen of the US, but I’m not particularly close to Brussels.
Also, don’t you reckon the US also benefits enormously from trade with the EU ?
Oh, piss on that. Everybody came to your help after 9/11. Everybody was pissed off and everybody pulled their weight. Even Denmark had a sector covered in Afghanistan. Fucking *Denmark *! I didn’t even know they knew what a gun was. Yet here they went getting their nuts blown off in Helmand for your sake.
We didn’t support you in Iraq 2, mostly because y’all were being retarded and lied to. Which we tried to tell you (except Tony Blair, who had his tongue so far up Bush’s ass crack he could lick the latter’s teeth). Maybe we should have and there wouldn’t have been an ISIS born of y’alls general incompetence, half-assedness and carelessness ; but that’s another (hi)story.
Which other conflicts can you think of the EU or Canada hasn’t “properly” supported ?
What the fuck do you care what the guy who makes your salami thinks about politics ? Furthermore, you know the only consequence of caring about it ? No salami for you no more. Is that a good thing ?
Or maybe, just maybe we did it, at long last, to stop having a world war every 30 years because we kept competing over the same things and kicking sand in each other’s faces. Fuck’s sake, the idea of uniting Europe and having some sort of transnational parliament was already being floated before there even was a U.S.
Well, yes, you gave a really good description of xenophobia, which is also what I said; I just didn’t go into the details. We’re in agreement as to the #1 reason.
Free trade is popular with political “elites” but protectionism has always resonated with everyone else, mainly because of the notion that our agreements have only had negative consequences on the middle class, which is far from true. The global economy is highly complex – far too complex for the average person to understand without having the interest and time to devote to learning about it. And most people would rather watch TV or blog on Facebook.
Protectionism is not just a winner with Trump’s GOP, but also independents and even a lot of Democrats. Bernie Sanders made a serious run at Hillary Clinton by milking populist themes and trashing TPP. So if you think that Democrats and progressive voters are going to push back at Trump for injuring relationships with our allies…I would not be so confident of that.
That doesn’t change the fact that we’re beginning an irreversible slide toward a modern form of isolationism, and that this will lead to everything from deep recessions to major wars. But you’re not going to convince the average voter of that.
+1
Were Trump to succeed in MAGA through a beggar thy neighbour strategy, throwing the rest of the Western Hemisphere under a bus, there’d be a bipartisan move to repeal the 22nd Amendment.
As I said in the parallel thread, I think a lot of it is about misconceptions and, frankly, ignorance.
And one thing I can say about trump is that he’s ignorant in popular ways.
For example, many people will be aware that free trade helps big corporations. But it makes average Joe’s shopping cheaper too. Plus of course it’s not zero sum.
Sure but things are not quite as simple as all that because for one thing many wealthy western countries have a large trade deficit overall.
For another, the US is a net recipient of investment capital, again like many wealthy western countries.
Trying to boost exports is fine, but with the understanding that it’s just one facet of an economy, and not something you need to “win” at for your country to remain solvent.
This is slightly off topic, but the old “it’s too complex to understand” argument doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me.
Physics is really complex but people can grasp general physics concepts and apply them in real life to build things. I don’t think the guy who built my house is Albert Einstein by my house seems pretty solid. Chemistry is very complex, but people can become excellent cooks. Biology is wildly complex but people can understand how their bodies work to a highly useful degree. I am no biologist but I have a fundamental understanding as to how vaccines work, and anyone can attain such an understanding. The reason some people refuse to believe vaccines are safe cannot be because they are hard to understand. It must be something else.
Economics is no more hard to understand, with a tiny bit of effort, than physics, chemistry, or biology. I have a degree in it from a good school and I am notoriously stupid. I have had the experience of explaining economic concepts to people and seeing them come to an understanding they did not have before. None of those conversations lasted longer than twenty minutes. It’s not that hard, really.
The thing about economics that makes it more commonly misunderstood is that it just isn’t taught. Everyone takes basic science in high school. My high school didn’t have a course in economics and I think that’s still a rare thing. I never encountered it at all until I took it first year in university largely because my buddy did and I was astonished; I must have learned ten things I never knew before, not because they were hard, but because I simply had never been told those things before.
All of this is true, but level of ignorance by Trumpists on the matter of trade (or just about anything else, really) is equivalent to believing, in the realm of physics, that we can never build spacecraft because in space there is nothing for a rocket engine to push against. The misunderstandings are so fundamental that they lead to exactly the wrong decisions being taken. The zero-sum mentality tells these yokels that if a bunch of foreigners are unhappy with their hero’s trade policies, then it must be good for the US. (In case the yokels have any lingering doubts about this, Trump tells them that the reason foreign leaders are smiling all the time is that they just can’t believe they’re getting away with so blatantly taking advantage of the US.) Just like it tells them that if immigrants are anxious to come to the US, then they must be plotting to become parasitic leaches on the American economy. Meanwhile the US has a labor shortage and declining productivity growth, and on the trade front, retaliatory trade wars are going to hobble American farmers and businesses and potentially send the whole global economy into a tailspin. But by the time the effects are fully felt, the idiot-in-chief will either be impeached or sent into oblivion when his term expires.
