The Left is still looking for scapegoats for his 2016 victory, and the coterie of critics on the right — loosely referred to as Never Trump — often sound like they are in denial.
.. A serious primary challenge is not in the offing. For that to change, it would probably take a smoking-gun revelation in the Mueller probe or some other jaw-dropping scandal, plus a significant political betrayal. And if Trump crashes and burns, it is doubtful the 2020 nomination would be worth having. This means that Trump’s welfare is inextricably caught up with the party’s.
.. Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have been the potent figure he was in the late 1970s if he hadn’t pounded away at the premier populist-nationalism issue of the time, resistance to giving up the Panama Canal: “We bought it. We built it. We paid for it. It’s ours.”We can argue about what role populism and nationalism should have in conservative politics, but that they have a place, and always have, is undeniable.
.. Trump is not seriously engaged enough to drive this himself, while congressional Republicans lack interest in immigration restriction and oppose Trump on trade. But make no mistake: On immigration and China trade, Trump is closer to the national Republican consensus than his conservative detractors.
.. By all means, criticize him when he’s wrong. But don’t pretend that he’s just going away, or that he’s a wild outlier in the contemporary GOP.
The Case for Responsible Nationalism
The excesses of globalization are real, but trade wars aren’t the answer.
More than two decades ago, Harvard economist Dani Rodrik warned that globalization was driving a wedge between workers who had the skills and mobility to prosper in the global economy and those who did not. The key challenge, he argued, was to make globalization “compatible with domestic social and political stability”—that is, to ensure that international economic integration “does not contribute to domestic social disintegration.”
.. International trade weakens the postwar social contract between American employers and their workers. Less-skilled workers often are forced to accept lower wages, inferior benefits and diminished job security. Leading economists acknowledged that increased trade with lower-wage countries would widen the gap between highly skilled and less-skilled workers in advanced economies, but they played down the magnitude of these effects.
Western policy makers embraced the Panglossian assumption that maximizing open markets and minimizing social policy would produce better living standards for all. The West assumed that its edge in innovation and productivity would enable it to dominate in the 21st century as in the decades after World War II.
.. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. Yes, China had a large state-owned sector, used public resources to encourage the private economy, and broadly subsidized its producers. But over time, the thinking went, the communists would see the folly of propping up inefficient producers. The state sector would shrink, and the market would become more powerful. China’s economy would converge with the Western model, and its political institutions eventually would evolve too.
Democratic and Republican administrations then presided over a flood of Chinese imports that gutted entire sectors of the U.S. economy. After a period of stability in the 1990s, U.S. manufacturing employment shrank by more than three million between 2001 and 2007—before the onset of the Great Recession, which destroyed another two million jobs. These developments hit rural and small-town areas with particular force, creating the geographically concentrated sense of abandonment and loss that helped propel Mr. Trump to the White House.
.. automation—not protectionism—is the key to the future.
Michael Pillsbury: Trump Seeks to Thwart China’s Hundred-Year Plan for Economic and Military Dominance
“He’s offering them some solutions that he hopes they’ll move toward,” Pillsbury said. “One of them is, they simply purchase $100 billion worth of U.S. exports. Wilbur Ross, the secretary of commerce, went on television tonight and even hinted what that might be. It might be natural gas and oil – various kinds of products we sell them already, but they could buy a great deal more.”
.. “They knew this was coming,” he concluded. “The prime minister gave a press conference saying that China wants to open up further, wants to welcome more foreign investment, is totally for free trade, would never steal anybody’s intellectual property. He went through in this press conference almost point-for-point what President Trump was going to say today, and said China would not dream of doing these things.”
.. Pillsbury cautioned that many Americans retain an “out of date” image of China as poor, technologically backwards, and reluctant to provoke economic warfare with wealthier nations while so many of its people struggle with poverty.
“I wrote my book against that idea,”
.. The products targeted by the new tariffs and the rationale for including them will send a strong message to China. “It’s going to be examples, as this report explained today, the examples are based on a kind of reciprocity that if China has stolen intellectual property, stolen trade secrets and then made money off of it, that is the kind of product that will have the tariff placed on it.
.. Pillsbury predicted that the Chinese will now understand Trump means business, and will make concessions to hold off further sanctions.
“I happen to think they need us more than we need them,” he said. “I don’t measure just trade. I measure all the things we’ve essentially — I hate to use this phrase — given away to China over the last 30 or more years. They still need our investment, our technology, our goodwill, our buying their products, the scientific programs we share with them – there’s an extremely long list of the benefits China gets from the United States, counting everything.”
“We get very little benefit from them along those lines,” he continued. “We don’t get a wide, comprehensive set of benefits from China. We get some benefits. That’s where this debate is really happening.”
.. “My own forecast is there’s not going to be a big trade war. The Chinese are quite afraid of being demonized in the United States and around Asia. Despite the ambassador here in Washington making this unfortunate remark, I think what’s actually going to happen is we’re going to have some successful negotiations for the first time,” he said.
.. They’re not going to roll over and just suddenly buy $100 billion worth of products in the month of April, but I think we will see a number of steps by the Chinese that will justify what President Trump did today in this historic decision,” he anticipated.
.. what Vice President Mike Pence described yesterday as “the end of the era of economic surrender,”
.. even the American freedom of navigation patrols in the South China Sea, which the Chinese frequently complain about, do not represent an aggressive challenge because the American ships follow “innocent passage” protocols, keeping their weapons radars off and avoiding military maneuvers as they cruise through the area.
“We have not challenged China in the South China Sea yet. That’s the important thing to understand. Some people think we should. It’s very difficult to come up with specific measures, especially if you are looking at economics and trade issues as being more important. We can’t fight China on all fronts,” he said.
.. one of the Trump administration’s top goals is to place “restrictions on Chinese investment in the United States.”
.. two days ago, with the Trump tariffs looming, Beijing for the first time signaled a willingness to open new sectors to foreign investment.
Oh, What a Trumpy Trade War!
After all, trade (like racism) is an issue on which Trump has been utterly consistent over the years.
.. his views are based on zero understanding of the issues or even of basic facts, well, Trumpism is all about belligerent ignorance, across the board.
.. The real goal, instead, is to protect us from ourselves: to limit the special-interest politics and outright corruption that used to reign in trade policy.
Trumpocrats, however, don’t see corruption and rule by special interests as problems. You could say that the world trading system is, in large part, specifically designed to prevent people like Trump from having too much influence. Of course he wants to wreck it.
.. a trade war against the European Union would make America as a whole poorer, even if the E.U. didn’t retaliate (which it would). It would, however, benefit some industries that happen to face stiff European competition.
.. The small groups that benefit from protectionism often have more political influence than the much larger groups that are hurt.
.. the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930: Enough members of Congress were bought off, one way or another, to enact legislation that almost everyone knew was bad for the nation as a whole.
.. Tariff policy, which used to be one of the dirtiest, most corrupt aspects of politics both in the U.S. and elsewhere, has become remarkably (though not perfectly) clean.
.. the steel and aluminum tariffs, justified with an obviously bogus appeal to national security, clearly don’t pass the test.
.. But that won’t bother Trump. After all, we now basically have an
- Environmental Protection Agency run on behalf of polluters, an
- Interior Department run by people who want to loot federal land, an
- Education Department run by the for-profit schools industry, and so on.
Why should trade policy be different?
Comments:
Remember, when the Republicans blamed Obama for leading from behind. Is Trump’s leadership what they call leading from in front? Isolationism is leading from in front? Is that what Republicans call leadership?
.. I remember a time when republicans disliked Russia and loved free trade. That was so last election cycle. Now it is the opposite. What changed?
.. Until my late 20s
(in the 1970s) the United States had what is called a “regulated capitalism“. This resulted in a more or less balanced arrangement of economic outcomes for the majority of people. All quintiles rose when the GDP rose. They were two sides of the same coin: when the economy prospered, the American people prospered. This is no longer true.