By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, April 09, 2025
Democratic political strategist James Carville irritated
the party’s grassroots voters when he informed them that theatrical displays of
psychological distress would get them nowhere. Cathartic though it may be to
vent their passion, the smarter play would be to make few sudden movements and
await the inevitable day when the Trump administration made a politically
exploitable mistake.
That day was certainly upon us — until this afternoon,
when Trump announced a three-month pause on his global trade war (save the
onerous tariff regime imposed on China). And yet, Democrats struggled to make
the most of it. That’s understandable. The mistake Trump spent the past two
weeks making is one to which Democrats are quite partial.
Politico made a deserving example of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on Wednesday ahead of a
“nuanced” (read, confused) speech on economic policy in which she attempted to
argue that tariffs are a valuable tool that was only being misused by the
president. “I understand the motivation behind the tariffs,” Whitmer’s prepared
remarks read. “We do need fair trade,” she planned to note, adding that
Trump’s economic policies express the “new economic consensus that a lot of
Democrats and Republicans now share.”
In sentiment and substance, Whitmer’s responses to the
questions with which she was peppered after she delivered her prepared remarks reflect
far more anxiety over Trump’s approach than she revealed in her speech. Her
discombobulation had become relatively common among Democrats who were honest
enough to acknowledge the undesirable consequences that accompanied the
maximalist application of their policy preferences.
“The vast majority of Americans have no stocks,” Maine
Democrat Jared Golden insisted recently, echoing a wholly inaccurate talking point recently retailed by
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. To his credit, Golden is at least operating
on consistent assumptions buttressed by faulty or inaccurate economic data. “I
remember Dems being outraged by the World Trade Organization, NAFTA, all these
trade deals, even as recently as TPP,” he mused nostalgically. “Now all of a
sudden, it’s like a complete 180-degree flip here where we’re staunchly
defending the importance and relevance of the stock market to the American
economy and defending free trade deals.”
Yes, the onset of a global economic meltdown that
threatened to tank the U.S.-dominated geopolitical order is enough to make
curious minds revisit some of their assumptions.
In a gentle but nevertheless wise critique of the
protectionist left, The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait expressed similar discontent with the way in
which some of the Democratic Party’s leading lights seem incapable of
acknowledging the opportunity in the disaster over which the president is
presiding:
Not all Democrats are invested in
maintaining this position. But many are, especially those representing heavily
unionized districts or belonging to the party’s progressive wing. They are
eager to prevent their party from straightforwardly opposing Trump’s
protectionist lurch—a reaction that voters might construe as a defense of free
trade.
This has it precisely right. For the better part of 20
years, liberals and progressives have marinated in an intellectual environment
in which daring to acknowledge the benefits of the post–Cold War free trade
architecture was regarded as apostasy. Liberalized trade regimes were deemed by
liberals in good standing “a
disaster,” an artifact of the Reagan era to which only quislings like Bill Clinton genuflected.
This influence operation was so successful among
Democrats that, by 2016, even advocates of free trade regimes with America’s
Pacific Rim partners were anathema to Democrats — up to and including the
Democrats who helped negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The illogic
of this can be found in the Trump administration’s rhetoric. Those who have
enough respect for voters to promulgate a logic to Trump’s global trade war
maintain that its goal is to establish free trade regimes with America’s
friends and partners, after which point they can “approach
China as a group.” Of course, multilateral free trade agreements have been
successfully negotiated in the past, even in the absence of a global economic
meltdown. But conflict is the paradigm that those who foolishly regard trade as
a zero-sum game prefer.
Trump’s trade policies were left-wing trade policies
before Republicans were muscled into either zealously adopting them or keeping
their concerns to themselves. The Democratic presidents who followed Clinton
deferred to the left’s preferred rhetorical hostility toward free trade, but
they also knew their party’s political viability depended on the prosperity and
growth that follows economic activity. So, Barack Obama and Joe Biden
could load the teleprompter with attacks on the foundational precepts that
buttressed the global trade regime while presiding over generally (with plenty
of exceptions at the margins) classically liberal policies. That was a
dishonest enterprise. We’re now seeing the cognitive dissonance it has produced
among those who didn’t comprehend the political game being played at their
expense.
A handful of enterprising Democrats have stuck their necks out in an
effort to broadcast a coherent opposition to Trump’s policies. For the most
part, however, Democrats remain defensive of their prerogative to insulate
favored constituencies against efficient and cost-effective competition. “The
problem is not tariffs, generally,” read one illustrative remark from Michigan
congresswoman Hillary Scholten. “It’s the way that Trump is doing them.”
True protectionism has never been tried.
Under the immense pressure accompanying the annihilation
of trillions of dollars worth of lost economic activity, Trump orchestrated a retreat from his global trade war while
declaring victory. For 90 days, the world will see what Trump does with the
immense and constitutionally dubious powers the lethargic Congress has
outsourced to the executive branch — save goods from China, which domestic importers
will have to pay 125 percent over market prices to secure. Despite that,
markets breathed a sigh of relief — a turn of events that should convince
advocates of protectionist policies to revisit their assumptions.
Don’t hold your breath. Republicans didn’t arrive at
their support for whatever Donald Trump proposes after a process of reasoned
study and analysis, and they’re not going to be budged off their deference to
the president in response to market forces. The same is true of Democrats. This
is now a tenet of a bipartisan faith.
Leaderless and bereft of any unifying principle beyond
their hostility to Republicans, Democrats will likely undergo a rapid forced
evolution over the next three years. They will be bombarded by foreign stimuli,
and they will have to innovate some new survival mechanisms if they hope to
thrive in this suddenly unfamiliar environment. It is unclear yet whether the
party’s vestigial protectionist appendage will outlast this period of flux.
If it does, however, America’s trading partners — allied
and adversarial alike — will have to abandon the hope that the United States
will someday reinvest in the preservation of global prosperity. America will
become host to two major parties of the same mind on core issues like spending
and trade, a consensus in which profligacy and protectionism are the norm and
maximum individual economic liberty is the departure.
If that’s what “owning the libs” looks like, we can
understand why they don’t seem all that defeated.
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