Matt Yglesias has a piece at Slow Boring where he criticizes the idea that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), enacted by Clinton, is a major driver of working class disaffection with the Democratic party.
Chronology
Yglesias’s first critique is about the chronology of it. NAFTA was enacted in the 1990s while this most recent political realignment did not really crystallize until 2016:
It is unquestionably true that NAFTA was very unpopular in the industrial Midwest and that it continues to have a very bad reputation there. But it’s not possible that it was more salient in 2024 than it was a quarter century ago. This doesn’t explain anything about why Kamala Harris did so much worse in the industrial Midwest than Gore did.
The counter to this is that there was an intervening event that made NAFTA, a term that is used to refer to trade liberalization and offshoring generally, especially salient in a way that promoted realignment. That intervening event was a Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, who made it one of his two main issues. Prior to that point, Republicans were supporters of NAFTA and free trade. What opposition to it that did exist was on the Democratic side of things, though this was a minority position among elected Democrats.
I don’t think it’s at all inconceivable that dislike of trade and offshoring was a simmering aspect of working class politics that only became politically actionable in the form of party realignment when Trump came along.
Gore’s opponent was George W. Bush who expanded the number of countries the US had free trade agreements with from three to sixteen. Obama’s first opponent was John McCain who the UFCW characterized in 2008 at someone who “consistently voted for unfair trade agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization despite its ongoing history of human rights and workers’ rights violations.” Obama’s second opponent was Mitt Romney who released the following campaign position on trade in 2011:
It shouldn’t be surprising that none of these Republican candidates were able to electorally capitalize on anti-trade sentiments in the way that Trump did.
Narrow Impact
Yglesias’s second critique is that the negative impact of NAFTA (and trade liberalization more generally) was narrowly contained to a specific region of the country while the geography of the political realignment has been much broader.
The alternative explanation of why working class voters have swung against Democrats — they disagreed with 21st-century cultural liberalism — has much broader and deeper explanatory power. Firefighters on Staten Island didn’t have their wages undercut by imports from Mexico. Neither did retirees on the Gulf Coast in Florida. The localized economic impact of NAFTA on union manufacturing workers and factory towns is a very good explanation for why elected officials from those areas were against NAFTA, but the political trends are much too widespread to be explained by something so specific.
What’s interesting about this move is that Yglesias decides to compare the NAFTA explanation with an alternative cultural-liberalism explanation, concluding that the latter is broader than the former. Then, when explaining what he means by saying NAFTA is narrow, he offers the criteria of whether someone was directly impacted by it.
But what happens if we apply this directly-impacted criteria to cultural liberalism? How many firefighters on Staten Island or retirees on the Gulf Coast have actually been directly impacted by transgender athletes? Is voter opposition to immigration the strongest in areas where a lot of illegal immigrants live or areas where not very many live?
What Yglesias must recognize with these cultural issues is that various constituencies can develop strong opinions about them separate from whether they have any actual impact on their own lives. But something similar is also possible with NAFTA. Working class constituencies across the country can end up having strong opinions about trade liberalization and offshoring that motivate their electoral behavior even if they personally were spared the negative impacts.
In fact, if you listen to certain people talk about NAFTA, trade liberalization, and offshoring, you’ll actually hear a discourse that sounds a lot like the immigration discourse, which contains a mix of economic concerns (foreigners taking jobs and pushing down wage levels) alongside more cultural appeals to nationalism, nativism, and xenophobia. The foreign aid discourse looks that way too.
In this sense, trade liberalization is part of 21st century cultural liberalism, i.e. just another way in which liberal cultural sensibilities have them prioritizing foreigners over the native working class. Indeed, this is exactly the rhetorical synthesis that people like Trump and Vance have pursued about foreign aid, trade, and immigration, which in their telling are not just economic issues but also about the sick priorities of bleeding-heart liberals.
Strategic Considerations
With that all said, it’s not at all clear to me what the strategic way forward is. Just because you can tell a history where X caused Y, that does not mean that, going forward, not-X will reverse Y. And of course, as Yglesias points out, there are real tensions at play here between the goals of onshoring through trade deliberalization, counteracting monopoly and concentration through competition, and keeping prices low.
Per my usual bit, I’ll end here by just pointing out that if you install egalitarian economic institutions that result in a compressed distribution of income and wealth, the precise regional and sectoral composition of the economy becomes much less important. During trade liberalization, US output per capita did not decrease. In fact, it increased. It is the refusal to use economic institutions that ensure that these increases are broadly distributed that is ultimately the problem.