Foolish Democrats

True, Democrats do not flat-out oppose lower barriers to trade, or flat-out endorse explicitly protectionist measures. Instead, their views are usually couched in terms of environmental concerns and workers’ rights. Congressional Democrats, for instance, will claim that they are not against free trade; they just insist on provisos in free-trade agreements that no sovereign nation could possibly accept.

Would a Democratic President, were he or she to be elected, be willing to walk the walk of protectionism? That is a good question, and one that cannot be answered definitively in advance. It is certain, however, that any such President would be constrained by anti-free-trade campaign rhetoric, inhibited from advancing new free-trade proposals, and under pressure from constituent groups both to tighten the terms of old agreements and to take an increasingly tough line with America’s trading partners. If that should happen, the American position as an advocate of ever freer trade across national boundaries—an advocacy without which the extraordinary postwar increase in global trade would not have been possible—would be at risk of much graver and more perilous erosion.

That is why politicians who understand the overwhelming importance of free trade to our future as a nation must unceasingly make the case for its benefits, as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton did. By the same token, because no one today has personal memories of what happened when a downturn in the American economy and the workings of politics-as-usual produced the Smoot-Hawley tariff, thereby helping to turn an ordinary recession into the Great Depression, politicians favoring free trade are under an obligation to remind us of this repeatedly and in no uncertain terms. While they are at it, they might also be mindful of the sound warning tendered by the 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat: “Where goods do not cross frontiers, armies will.”