2008 Election: Could it Reverse “Globalization?”
Jan 12th, 2008 by John Stodder
When Bill Clinton took office in 1992, it signified a bipartisan consensus on the benefits of free trade. His predecessor, George H.W. Bush had promoted the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), and Clinton picked up where Bush left off. Ross Perot and organized labor fought the deal, but lost after Perot’s famous thrashing at the hands of Vice President Al Gore.
Now, 16 years later, the consensus is going the other way. Cooper Union Professor and author Fred Siegel writes in City Journal,
(T)he most surprising fact to emerge from New Hampshire was that voters in both parties named the economy as the Number One issue. New Hampshire, where more than 81 percent of the voters have at least some college education, is prosperous by any standard. It enjoys the lowest poverty rate in the country, one of the lowest unemployment and taxation rates, and is in the top echelon of income. Yet only 14 percent of its Democrats and half of its Republicans believe that the economy is doing well, while a stunning 98 percent of voters in the Democratic primary and 80 percent in the Republican primary were “worried” or “very worried” about the economy.
Some of these worries are no doubt a response to $100-a-barrel oil and the decline in home values tied to the subprime lending meltdown. But why aren’t more conventional measures, like high incomes and low unemployment, having a more positive influence on the electorate’s state of mind? The answer, in part, is that the public has a set of fears connected, in one way or another, to the inexorable advance of globalization. Voters see offshoring, increased competition from low-cost countries, and illegal immigration as reflections of an unfriendly world that is closing in on them. Investor’s Business Daily, citing the enormous growth of both jobs and gross national income that freer trade has brought about, insists that “globalization is a boon to all Americans.” But the distributional effects of globalization have been problematic. An October 2007 Pew poll found that “three-quarters of the population is worried about growing income inequality.” The relative stagnation in middle- and lower-middle-class incomes, combined with a net decline in high-tech jobs, has, for once, made palaver about “what will happen to our grandchildren” somewhat credible.
Obviously, anyone who calls globalization “inexorable” and uses the word “palaver” (meaning: idle chatter intended to flatter or beguile) to describe political rhetoric aimed at economic anxieties has made up his mind about globalization. The problem we global free-traders have is a mistaken belief that its benefits are self-evident, obviously logical, and that anti-globalists are either crackpots or special interests.
Now, the challenge will be to defend (or some might say “acknowledge the inevitability of”) globalization, without a candidate. The spectrum of opinions in this election about globalization range from strong opposition on one side to mushy temporizing at the other extreme. No one defends it unequivocally. Virtually every candidate is trying to explain away past advocacy for liberalizing treatment of illegal immigrants or post-NAFTA trade agreements.
Are these candidates just playing a game with voter prejudices? Or will the president who takes office a year from now bring with him or her a mandate for high walls and tariffs?
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