Opposition to Free Trade
By 
The opposition to our global trade policies and the decimation of the working class in the United States is driving a good bit of the election campaign. How strong is that opposition?
Opposition to free trade is a unifying concept even in a deeply divided electorate, with almost two-thirds of Americans favoring more restrictions on imported goods instead of fewer.
The latest Bloomberg Politics national poll shows the issue unites the country like few others, across lines of politics, race, gender, education, and income.
A stunning rejection of what was a postwar cornerstone of American economic and foreign policies reverberates again and again in the answers to the poll’s questions.
Large majorities or pluralities favor policies protecting domestic jobs over lower prices, describe the North American Free Trade Agreement as being bad for the U.S., and even prefer a U.S. company building a nearby factory to employ 1,000 workers over a foreign — in this instance Chinese — owner that would hire twice as many.
“Virtually every question of policy has a Republican-Democrat split,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, who oversaw the survey. “On trade, there is unity.”
In other words, elites of both parties have pressed on with free trade without creating a proper jobs policy for those who lose their jobs because of that trade. And while I don’t doubt that people like to buy the cheap stuff at Walmart that free trade also provides, you can’t blame people for saying that a system that has doomed them to stagnation at best and poverty at worst is a good system for them. They aren’t stupid. They know that their economic future is cloudy, probably with torrential rains. And they know why. Those who support free trade need to also be supporting, with just as much money and policy and lobbying, a jobs program to bolster the middle class. But instead, this is like fracking, where the nation has just plunged ahead with one part of the policy without understanding or really caring much about the side effects. Whether polluted groundwater and earthquakes where earthquakes shouldn’t happen or dying industrial communities and hand waves toward college education as an easy catch-all “solution,” policy makers and profit-seeking corporations damage the nation’s future for their personal immediate gains. People are sick of it and it’s time to change those policies. Americans need jobs. If they don’t have jobs, a whole lot of the white ones anyway are going to support fascists. We are already seeing that. Part of what is feeding Trump is poor white people who are desperate for jobs. Racism and economic necessity can intermingle, as we see in that poll with a lot of people preferring an American factory that employs 1000 or a Chinese-owned factory that employs 2000. It’s hardly surprising, given the lack of leftist organizing in white working class communities. But in any case creating those jobs, in the United States, needs to be a national priority. It is not.