By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, February 26, 2021
God save this country from the middle class.
The middle class has held domestic politics hostage for
generations, which is why the federal government’s main activity is
transferring money to the middle class, which is the principal beneficiary of
the major entitlement programs that account for the largest share of federal
spending — and of much of the so-called discretionary spending, too. And now
Joe Biden has taken foreign policy hostage on behalf of the middle class
as well, promising a “foreign policy for the middle class,” which is how you
say “America First!” without
sounding like the Tangerine Nightmare.
President Biden, who in the past has resorted to
plagiarism in order to compensate for the fact that he never has had an
original thought or produced an interesting sentence, is a plodding
vote-counter who ought to be retiring from the Wilmington Zoning Commission
rather than getting started in the White House. But Americans are politically
unserious people, and Biden won the gold in the Clown Olympics in November, so,
here we are.
Biden is a flatterer and a panderer, which is what the
market demands just at the moment. And so he declares: “There’s no longer a
bright line between foreign and domestic policy — every action we take in our
conduct abroad, we must take with American working families in mind.”
Working families?
If we were to pretend for a moment that this is an actual
idea rather than a rhetorical pose, it would be interesting to consider how it
might be applied: An Iranian nuclear weapon detonated in the San Francisco Bay
presumably would incinerate a fair proportion of the nation’s most irritating
idle rich, out there kayaking around or whatever it is they do all day, but it
also would inconvenience some “working families,” assuming the blast radius and
prevailing winds were sufficient to reach the plebs out there in Manteca or
wherever. I suppose that preventing the atomic ayatollahs from stockpiling and
deploying nuclear weapons would be in the interests of “working families” in
exactly the same way it would be in the interests of the rich guys on Sand Hill
Road and the derelicts in Berkeley. It is not clear where the middle class’s
particular interests enter into it.
There are many things the federal government can and
should be doing around the world that would provide no immediate material
benefit to the American middle class — and that might even cost that middle
class, to the relatively modest extent that middle-class Americans are ever
asked to pay for anything. If the United States intends to stand up for the
Uyghurs on the theory that the grateful clients of our human-rights patronage
are going to turn around and buy a lot of Buicks, then Americans are going to
be disappointed. All of the stories about real-world economic payoffs from
action on human rights or climate change are fairy tales. If you want action on
those items, then you’d better be pursuing that action because you think it’s
right, and you’d better be willing to pay for it — because it is going to be
expensive.
Biden’s reliably primitive analysis notwithstanding, the
American middle class does not have an undivided economic interest when it
comes to foreign relations. Biden has not learned from the Trump
administration’s errors, because Biden’s economic- and foreign-policy thinking
are based on the same assumptions even if they are couched in more conventional
diplomatic language. Some American workers would be better off if there were
less competition from abroad, but many would be worse off: The Trump
administration’s imbecilic misadventures with China cost American farmers
dearly — and if there is a definition of “working families,” it is farmers —
while recent attempts to put Washington’s big fat thumb on the scale of
international trade in steel and aluminum punished American manufacturers of
everything from construction products to ice-cold cans of domestic beer.
Trade with China is a challenge for Americans who want to manufacture cheap
sneakers domestically but a boon for working families of modest means with a
need for new shoes. There is no magic formula by which Americans get to enjoy
the benefits of globalization without also enduring the tradeoffs.
As Wolfgang Münchau put it in a useful essay,
“maximizing your trade surplus is not a strategy,” because strategy means
choices, and choices mean tradeoffs. “If you reduce your strategic perspective
to trade and investment alone, you confuse welfare maximisation with strategy.
Strategic choices are usually not economically optimal ones.”
But Biden’s formulation (“a foreign policy for the middle
class”) insists that foreign policy be made subordinate to a very narrow set of
economic considerations, considerations that just happen to coordinate with
short-term Democratic political ambitions.
There is strategy at work, true. But it is only an
electoral strategy.
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