Trade Policies of Both Parties Ignore What Most Americans Say They Want

James Bacchus

One of the few issues our two major political parties appear to agree on is their mutual embrace of protectionism in international trade. They are both increasingly committed to raising barriers to trade while ignoring the global rules that make freer trade possible. Yet a recent national survey by the Cato Institute shows that, with some quibbles and qualifications, a solid majority of the American people favor more trade.

What explains the stark inconsistency between what the people say they want and what the Republicans and Democrats, and especially those who wear those party labels in elected and appointed office in Washington, seem determined to give them?

According to the national survey, 66 percent of Americans believe global trade is good for the American economy; 64 percent believe it has increased material abundance in their own lives by increasing the variety of the products they can buy; 58 percent say it has improved their standard of living; 63 percent want to increase trade with other nations; 57 percent say doing so is good for their communities; and 53 percent have a favorable view of free trade.

Seventy-five percent of Americans worry that tariffs are raising consumer prices. Two-thirds of them, 66 percent, would oppose paying even $10 more for a pair of blue jeans due to tariffs—even if those tariffs are meant to help US blue jean manufacturing. In addition, three-fourths, 75 percent, worry that special interest groups are lobbying the government to impose tariffs or other restrictions on trade.

Virtually none of this is reflected in the current trade policies of our major political parties. Under the thrall of Donald Trump, Republicans have largely abandoned their longstanding historical support of free trade. Likewise, the decades-long struggle between free traders and protectionists for ascendancy in the Democratic Party has apparently ended in triumph for anti-trade protectionists. Although some Democrats are hoping Kamala Harris would step back as president from the most trade-restrictive and trade rule-scoffing of the policies of President Joe Biden—which are basically the same as those followed while in office by former President Trump—these wistful hopes seem mainly to be founded on wishful thinking.

Instead of pursuing the generally pro-trade sentiments of most of the American people, as demonstrated in the Cato survey, Republicans and Democrats alike are headed in the opposite direction. Trump is doubling and tripling down as “Tariff Man” with ever-evolving proposals for higher and higher tariffs on worldwide imports. The Democrats have had a hard time keeping up with his tariff-happy tweets, but they, too, are imposing and promising more regressive taxes on the American people in the form of tariffs.

Neither party seems to think trade is good for the American economy, neither appears to want to increase trade, and neither is trying to conclude or is committed to concluding more international trade agreements. Worst of all, Republicans and Democrats are united in ignoring international laws on trade and in impeding and undermining the World Trade Organization and its rule-based trade dispute settlement system.

Why this disjunction between the two parties and most of the people on trade? Put simply, both parties have been captured by minorities with minority views. Neither party is representing the broadest measure of their membership or the broadest extent of the American people. Both are responding mostly to their political “base,” which ignores a lot of other Americans—more moderate and centrist members of both parties and the independent voters who comprise a growing portion of the American electorate and are likely to be more favorable to more trade.

The Pew Research Center has found that only six percent of Americans and 12 percent of Democrats are of the “progressive left,” which is leading the charge against trade within the Democratic Party. The Republican Party has been captured by Trump and other anti-trade tribunes of economic nationalism, but there remain millions of traditional Republicans who, though exiled from Republican decision-making, nevertheless are still within the American electorate. Moreover, Gallup polling shows that a record 49 percent of Americans “see themselves as politically independent—the same as the two parties put together.” These many millions of Americans have been pushed aside in the policymaking of American politics.

In all their policymaking, both parties are now pulled by their “base” to the extremes. Republicans are pulled to their political right, where trade protectionism and other manifestations of the economic nationalism of Donald Trump prevail. Democrats are pulled to their political left, where progressivism is increasingly equated with protectionism and other forms of economic nationalism. The embrace by both parties of different versions of an interventionist and trade-discriminatory industrial policy by the federal government is one consequence of this pull to the extremes. With trade and numerous other issues, the center is not holding in American politics because, except in periodic general elections, it is not present and so is not heard in policymaking.

In the US House of Representatives and in many state legislatures, this hollowing out of the American political center is a result of gerrymandering in drawing the lines of congressional and legislative districts, which empowers the political extremes at the expense of the political middle in the electorate. This gerrymandering by both parties diminishes the political legitimacy of our democratic republic while advancing minority views that are translated into policy, including in international trade. Meanwhile, the vast center of the American electorate is increasingly left unrepresented. Where both parties once competed to be responsive to the political center in the country, now they often seem to ignore it, especially in their legislative and executive decision-making.

Instead, as the voters surveyed by Cato rightly fear, policymakers and decision-makers who should be pursuing the public interest increasingly hear and heed the voices and the views of self-seeking private interests. In trade, this includes those labor unions with workers in trade-challenged declining industries in politically pivotal states, and threatened businesses in those industries in those states that cannot—or will not—meet the challenge of global competition and thus seek to be sheltered from such competition behind protectionist trade barriers. Because these key states, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, are crucial to the outcome of presidential elections and to control of Congress, popular calls for more openness to trade from other sectors in other states go unanswered.

Among the quibbles and qualifications to the overall desire of most Americans for more trade, as evidenced by the Cato survey, is the fact that most Americans want to make certain that trade policy benefits Americans. A majority of Americans, 56 percent, support putting tariffs on goods from foreign countries if those countries impose restrictions on goods from the United States.

This support plummets, however, if these retaliatory tariffs increase domestic prices, decrease innovation and US business growth, or decrease jobs in other American companies that rely on the imports affected by the tariffs (Figure 1). Overall, 61 percent of Americans believe US businesses must “learn how to become strong and compete globally without any government handouts or taxpayer subsidies” (Figure 2). Despite this, both parties are increasingly addicted to subsidies and other handouts, including protectionist tariffs.

Another qualification to the support of most Americans for more trade is the question of trade with China. Few Americans—only 15 percent—think that China has acted fairly in trade with the United States. Not surprisingly, both parties have “get tougher” policies on trade with China. However, 81 percent of Americans surveyed by Cato overestimated the share of imports the United States receives from China. (The correct answer is about 15 to 16 percent.) If the broad middle of the American electorate were better heard in American policymaking, a more temperate—and less bellicose—view might be evidenced in policymaking on China trade, perhaps leading to mutually beneficial solutions that have eluded the two trading partners thus far.

Like the overall support of most Americans for trade, these and other nuances in this majority support are blurred in the broad brush of pure protectionism that is manifested more and more in the trade policies of both parties. Hence the widening gap between what the American government, and the politicians who populate it, are saying and doing on trade and what most Americans seek in trade.

On trade policy, those who are leading us, and those who would lead us, are not giving voice to the views of the majority of the American people who generally support trade. Unless this changes, the result will be an American economy and an American future smaller than what they would be if the majority views were heard and reflected in US trade policy.