The polling is clear: Democratic voters hate tariffs. In a late March YouGov poll for CBS News, 88 percent of Democratic respondents said they oppose new tariffs on imported goods. That poll was taken before President Trump announced huge new tariffs on April 2 that caused the S&P 500 to dive 10 percent in two days and the American public to get a crash course in trade economics. After a week of financial market carnage, the president relented partly — he’s still proceeding with a 125 percent tariff on China and 10 percent on most of the rest of the world. In response, the markets partly recovered.
It’s a pattern we’ve seen for the last two months, including when the president surprised markets in early March with his apparent intent to move forward with tariffs on Canada and Mexico: Mr. Trump announces tariffs, and the market tanks; he announces some kind of tariff reprieve, and the market bounces back, but only part of the way. At the market close on Wednesday, the S&P 500 was still down over 10 percent from its peak on Feb. 19.
That value destruction at Mr. Trump’s hands is bad news for the more than 60 percent of American adults who own stocks or mutual funds. But it’s also bad news for everyone else, because the lower stock prices reflect a worsening business outlook that will have companies laying off workers, canceling expansion plans and raising prices. That worsened outlook is partly because the president is fostering uncertainty, but it’s also partly just because tariffs are bad for the economy, and even a reduced version of the president’s tariff vision will still have tariff rates far higher than when he took office.
The president’s economically destructive and unpopular policies could not be easier for Democrats to message against, and yet some of them can’t figure out how. They can now be the party that wants to make Americans rich and free. They should seize that opportunity, instead of offering their own version of an anti-commerce, anti-prosperity, pro-tariff agenda.
On Friday, Mr. Trump posted on social media “to the many investors coming into the United States” that “this is a great time to get rich.” This was obviously wrong — stocks were tanking because the president has made it a poor time to invest in the United States. But Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, accepted Mr. Trump’s premise, reposting his message and adding, “and the rich get richer” — on a day when the Dow Jones industrial average fell over 2,000 points.
Other Democrats have insisted that Mr. Trump’s trade policies aren’t trade policies at all. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who has pitched himself as a leader who can take the party in a post-neoliberal direction, put out a video insisting that Mr. Trump’s tariffs are “not economic policy” and “not trade policy” but instead “a political weapon designed to collapse our democracy.” As Mr. Murphy points out, one problem with the tariffs is Mr. Trump’s mercurial nature and his desire to have chief executives begging in the Oval Office for exemptions from his destructive policies.
But the tariffs are still economic policy — the markets wouldn’t be reacting to them if they weren’t. And the only reason tariffs work as a political weapon is that they are economically destructive.
Other Democrats — including House representatives, such as the progressive Pramila Jayapal and the self-described “economic patriot” Chris Deluzio — have been arguing that Mr. Trump is doing tariffs wrong, but that tariffs done right would be good for the economy.
The problem with this attitude is that some Democratic officials share an economic worldview that is fundamentally similar to Mr. Trump’s. They seem to think it’s bad when Americans have access to the plethora of higher-quality and lower-cost products that can be imported from abroad, and they want to put up trade barriers even if that means lower standards of living for Americans.
These Democrats are also fundamentally skeptical of commerce and want to give the government discretionary powers to force businesses to act in line with a political agenda — they would just prefer to vest those discretionary powers in Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, instead of Mr. Trump. As such, they cannot recognize the president’s assault on American commerce as straightforwardly bad. Instead, they talk about how they would do it differently.
This posture reflects the party’s composition as a coalition of interest groups. There are Democrats who mostly care about climate change and define what it is to be a “good” Democrat on climate, gun control activists who decide where the party should be on guns, and so on.
The party’s ethos on tariffs has been left to unions that perceive themselves as benefiting from trade restriction — even as those unions’ members increasingly vote Republican. They are joined by a handful of left-wing anti-globalization intellectuals who happen to share a funding base with the right-wing groups like American Compass that have formed the intellectual basis (to the extent you can say one exists) for the president’s anti-trade policies.
For the rest of the Democratic Party coalition, tariffs have been a low-salience issue. But tariffs are a Trump thing now, and Democratic voters oppose Trump things. Tariffs are also likely to be the dominant policy issue of the midterm elections, since by then they may have driven the country into a totally unnecessary recession.
The only sensible strategy for retaining Democratic voters while also winning over the swing voters who thought Mr. Trump was going to bring them a better economy is to stand firmly against Mr. Trump on tariffs.
Some Democratic voters who thought they liked tariffs are about to be disabused of that view. It is true that tariffs can narrowly advantage workers in some industries despite having negative effects on the economy overall. The most obvious example is that tariffs on materials like steel and lumber can advantage American workers in the steel and lumber industries, even while they raise costs for consumers and hurt workers in industries that consume those materials, like automaking and homebuilding. So when the steelworkers’ union supports steel tariffs, it’s putting the narrow interests of its members ahead of the broad interest of the country.
But when the autoworkers’ union supports Mr. Trump’s auto tariffs — which apply also to components of cars their members assemble in the United States — it’s just making a mistake. That mistake is likely to become apparent to autoworkers as auto companies implement layoffs and American consumers put off purchases of newly too-expensive cars.
The best policy case for tariffs today applies to trade with China, a hostile global power from which we should seek to decouple. But tariffs on China serve a national security purpose, not an economic one — indeed, they impose an economic cost, which we would endure to obtain a national security benefit. A plan to isolate China also requires developing deeper and freer economic relationships with other countries adverse to China, such as Vietnam and Japan.
The Obama administration pushed in this direction by negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but Democrats abandoned that project in a fit of populist pique in 2016 and now Mr. Trump is setting about driving these countries into China’s arms. Democrats should commit to reversing those bipartisan mistakes — picking up the pieces of the world order Mr. Trump is shattering and recommitting to free trade agreements with friendly countries.
Democrats should also fight to repeal the emergency tariff powers Mr. Trump is abusing — to be clear, for any president, Republican or Democrat — so other countries will find our commitments in trade agreements to be credible again.
The good political news for Democrats is that Republicans are rapidly abandoning their traditional position as the political party that stands for commerce, abundance, prosperity and growth. I have recently heard Republicans mouthing talking points I would never have imagined. They are out there declaring that “cheap goods” — also known as low prices — aren’t important; that a crashing stock market is just an opportunity for Main Street to rise in its wake; and that voters won’t mind if Mr. Trump’s attempted national project of reindustrialization forces them to pay higher prices. People are not going to enjoy hearing this any more than they enjoyed hearing Democrats tell them that inflation under Joe Biden wasn’t that bad or that important.
Despite an increasingly bipartisan tradition of criticizing our country’s economic system, Americans enjoy the highest median incomes in the world, save for a few tiny countries, including Switzerland and Luxembourg. Our defining national characteristic is our openness to commerce, innovation, hard work and growth, and the lifestyle that openness makes possible. That prosperity is what makes people from all over the world want to move here, even as Americans themselves have increasingly taken it for granted.
Now Mr. Trump is ripping that away from us, and the zombified Republican Party is lining up behind him to explain why that’s actually good and we should be happy about it.
Democrats have an enormous opportunity, and they would be crazy not to seize it.
#Opinion #Democrats #Party #Americans #Rich
