Is there a big protectionist groundswell in post-America? We might want to rethink that

Michael Strain at the American Enterprise Institute has a column today at Bloomberg entitled "Republicans Rejected Free Trade for No Reason."

LITD highly recommends it:

Donald Trump's election in 2016 was taken as clear evidence that Americans were fed up with globalization. Though elites and economists supported free trade, the silent majority of Americans, left to live with its effects, did not. Protectionist sentiment was resurgent. Economic nationalism and “America First” have since become the order of the day, the consequences of a bottom-up reaction from the people. 

 The problem with this new conventional wisdom about trade is that it may be wrong, according to a new study based on polling data from a variety of organizations.

The author, Scott Lincicome, an international trade lawyer and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, found that the solid majority of Americans support trade and globalization. A March 2018 Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, for example, finds that “Americans overwhelmingly think trade is more of an opportunity to boost the economy than it is a threat to it”; the margin was 66 percent to 20 percent.

In the same month, Gallup found that 70 percent of U.S. adults “see foreign trade as an opportunity for U.S. economic growth through increased exports,” while only 25 percent see trade as a “threat to the economy” due to foreign imports. 

Lincicome contrasts the central role trade played in the 2016 campaign with evidence that the issue simply wasn't a priority even then for most Americans. He highlights a poll taken after the Republican National Convention in July 2016 nominated Trump for president. This poll found that half of respondents had no opinion on “rolling back free-trade agreements” like the North American Free Trade Agreement. (Out of the 12 issues polled, the second-highest “no opinion” score, on Medicare vouchers, was 29 percent.) 

Overall, two-thirds of respondents were largely disinterested — either indifferent, weakly supportive or weakly opposed to curtailing free-trade agreements. 

These results jibe with more recent surveys. Lincicome highlights a January 2018 Pew poll in which respondents ranked global trade last among issues that should be a top priority for the federal government. Pew noted that, historically, “dealing with global trade issues has been among the lowest-ranked priorities over the past two decades.” In June 2018, a Gallup poll found that only 1 percent of Americans think “foreign trade/trade deficit” is “the most important problem facing the country today.”

Importantly, Lincicome’s paper documents shifts in attitudes that correlate with the state of the economy and with politics. Support for trade fell during the Great Recession and rebounded during the recovery. 

I remember the 2015 - 16 era and how Laura Ingraham, on her radio show, kept harping away about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as if it was a front-burner issue, when no one else was nearly as preoccupied with it.

There seems to be little doubt that there is indeed a very large swath of post-Americans who feel that their everyday concerns are not understood or addressed by elected officials or policy wonks, but Trumpists may have read too much in terms of specific trade policy into that.

Strain offers a way to address those concerns that can actually lead to something other than a closing off of organic economic exchange:

It could be a focal point for frustration with economic and cultural change. In this sense, the conventional wisdom about trade might be evidence that public policy needs to create more real on-ramps to economic opportunity for lower-income and working-class Americans. 

But even that way of framing it makes me wary. We're awfully quick, it seems to me, to assume that "public policy" can "create" things that benefit sovereign individuals. I'm more inclined to think that truly organic economic opportunity happens on the level of particular needs and particular ideas for profitably meeting those needs.

Maybe Strain would say we're talking about the same thing, which is probably true, at least to a large extent. I just get wary of accepting the terms of discussion about economics as being what some big entity - generally government, or the administrative apparatus more broadly - can "do" for some amorphous "people."

In any event, his main point is spot-on. Protectionism is a road to nowhere.