The End of Free Trade

Free Trade and the US Election

When I read this article from the BBC last year, I didn't find it interesting because of the implications for the 2008 election. At the time, election season was still early, candidates hadn't been chosen, and policy visions hadn't been wholly thought out and cemented. What caught me was one statistic: 60% of republican voters think that free trade is bad for America. The republican party, traditionally supporters of opening markets, and almost wholly turning away from liberal go-to arguments about sweatshops and foreign labor rights, have turned away from free trade as a core policy value.

The article was written in the context of Bush attempting to push multiple bilateral free trade deals, with Peru, Korea, Columbia, and Panama, through Senate. The Doha round of WTO negotiations was beginning to become a clear failure, and congress had failed to renew bush's fast track authority, which allowed the president to bring free trade deals to a vote on the senate floor without any amendments. These failures already indicated that the democratic congress may have brought a slow stop to the free trade movement evident with groundbreaking negotiations with the WTO, NAFTA, and CAFTA. While Bush was able to successfully lobby the senate to approve his free trade agreement with Peru, it was negotiated to include labor restrictions and rights amendments not traditionally a part of the conservative trend of opening markets. In fact, such actions by the democratic senate have forced the president to re-negotiate each of these bilateral free trade deals with the allies who signed them. Further deals may be in jeopardy with the lame duck president and his already ambitious foreign policy in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.

I believe that this trend will only continue at a faster rate in the next year. The economic malaise in the United States means that the most popular argument to turn moderate middle and lower class voters against free trade, "they're taking our jobs!", will be a powerful political tool. Add to this the polling data that show the lack of even republican support for free trade, and the issue will either become irrelevant or a universally opposed concept. For proponants of free trade, this could be an issue--it's the bicycle theory of free trade, if you don't keep riding, you fall over. 2008 may be the year when the United States stops riding.