Free Traders Are Talking Past the Working Class

By Joseph Palange

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

 

Since “liberation day,” free traders have launched a strong and sustained attack against Trump’s new tariff policy — and justifiably so. People far more credentialed than I have written about the intellectual bankruptcy of this policy. As someone who has read Smith, Hayek, Schumpeter, etc., I do not quibble with their analyses.

 

Yet in knocking arguments in favor of tariffs down on their merits, something can get lost. The protectionist defenses of them are so disjointed and incoherent that the reasons for their appeal are challenging to discern. But free traders need to understand that, to the extent the tariffs are popular, it is because they resonate with those in the working class who feel like they are the ostensible losers in global free trade. Critics of protectionism need to argue differently if they expect to reach the working class.

 

To understand why, you have to understand the working class at more than an intellectual level. Experience helps. I have never had a job that did not pay me by the hour and I have only ever showered at the end of the day as opposed to the beginning. I have worked in some of the most productive steel mills in the country. Buildings that in their glory days crawled with people, like kicked-over anthills, and now, due to automation, still hum, while resembling post-apocalyptic wastelands. I have worked in places far more depressing, in which a few sparse lines run in cavernous buildings set on miles-long abandoned industrial campuses. I have watched the seasoned men I work with get drunk on nostalgia, as they recall a state of the world that could only be so perfect when playing on the unsoiled reel of memory.

 

Those in the working class often drive down streets that traded bustling businesses for blighted and empty storefronts, and past dilapidated houses and buildings spared the wrecking ball by virtue of a failing local government unable to raise the funds for their destruction. They feel the realities noted by Richard Reeves in Of Boys and Men: that the next generation of men seems lost, despaired, unmotivated, and lacking the values that once defined our culture. They experience what Kevin Williamson has written about so brilliantly, the heartbreak of living in and around company towns or industrial neighborhoods whose painful death has dragged on for years. They feel the disappearance of the poor yet tight-knit and low-crime neighborhoods that Jane Jacobs wrote about.

 

These depressing realities are best explained as a product of complicated sociological forces, cultural failures, and well-intentioned yet paternalistic public policy mistakes. But scapegoating  global free trade carries the irresistible charm of a false but clear idea.

 

Because these problems are not the necessary outgrowth of free trade, and because there are so many benefits to trade, free traders are talking past what makes protectionism so seductive. Their arguments are about the incredible prosperity facilitated by free trade, but do not make qualifications about failures that feel linked to it. Yet these failures make free trade feel like it has taken more from the working class than it has given.

 

The truth is that the successes and failures come alongside one another. Take Detroit. Its greater metropolitan area is more prosperous than ever before — while its economic engine and cultural heart, the city proper, has been in a state of free-falling decay for decades on end. Its downtown resembles an office park surrounded by a vast sea of half-abandoned slums that act as a buffer zone between it and where most Detroiters have retreated to, the suburbs. Unemployment is low, but the collapsing relics of the former economy still loom as monuments of a hollow nostalgia over the city. These strange paradoxes give a faint feeling of destitution to the whole area, regardless of how well individual people might be doing.

 

This is a story that defines many American cities and towns today. The downsides of the transition away from an industrial economy make it hard for a lot of people to see clearly the prosperity that transition generated. Protectionists offer a simple solution. It doesn’t matter if many of the explanations for decline and hardship have nothing to do with free trade; or that, as JD Vance put it before he became vice president, “if you’re worried about America’s economic interest, focus more on automation/education than trade protectionism.” It doesn’t even matter if the real explanations would identify too little economic freedom, as opposed to too much, as the primary cause. Without the right explanations and qualifications, arguments about the prosperity free trade has brought fall on deaf ears.

 

One way to persuade free trade skeptics is an argument familiar to economists. Do not to tell people what they should prefer, but rather explain how their preferences are more available in a free market. Free traders often argue that global trade frees domestic workers from the toil of labor. This argument, however, does not land how they think it will. While those in the working class are not necessarily hoping that their kids will work in a textile mill, many do not understand why anyone would want a desk job. They tend to find meaning and dignity in hands-on skilled labor, and they believe working class culture is an indispensable part of American culture.

 

So it is not enough simply to tell people that it’s a net positive to send manufacturing overseas — unless the goal is to drive such people into protectionism. It is essential to explain how free trade facilitates division of labor and specialization, how it drives down the price of inputs manufactured by low-skilled labor elsewhere, and how it therefore facilitates more high-skilled labor domestically. This more sophisticated perspective makes it possible to argue that, say, apparel-manufacturing jobs are a terrible form of blue-collar employment — without implying that blue-collar jobs as a whole are inherently inferior to white-collar service jobs. The latter is a losing proposition to the working class.

 

A positive agenda to restore the economic well-being of the working class is also necessary. Cheaper inputs would only be a start in such an agenda. Applying supply-side lessons to liberate restrictions in the building sector, such as zoning and building codes and regulatory burdens from agencies like OSHA (which the working class hates, I assure you), would increase construction employment and drive demand for skilled tradesmen. Trade could lead to a resurgence of artisanship and craftsmanship as people with disposable incomes look for bespoke goods. People with extra money buy handmade furniture; those without go to Ikea. A winning proposition to those in the working class is that we are trading low-skilled assembly jobs for high-skilled trades and crafts — not desk jobs they do not understand.

 

The free trade case is correct. But free traders need to frame their arguments differently. Not because they are wrong, but because the emphasis is off and the “to be sures” do not scratch the right itch. The working class is looking for a place at the table. Arguments about offshoring labor often feel like telling them they will not need — or even that they do not deserve — one. Those in the working class are looking to address problems that feel like the outgrowth of global trade. Arguments about our staggering prosperity — while true — feel incomplete. Making the case for free trade only along such lines conveys to skeptics the sense that free traders do not believe there are any problems to solve.

 

Americans open to protectionism are not all hoping to sew sweatpants and assemble iPhones. Many simply see public policy failures that seem caused by free trade, and want to live in dynamic places where a working class culture and practical knowledge have not disappeared. They want to be assured that there are jobs with dignity for people like them. Free trade has not caused their woes. In combination with liberated supply-side restrictions and good governance, it has far more to offer them than protectionism. But few are telling them that.