Kimberly Clausing – Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital
This is a book that needed to be written. Progressives have long had a complicated relationship with trade and immigration. On one side, there is a free-trade tradition including progressive heroes such as Cordell Hull, FDR’s Secretary of State; President John F. Kennedy, who passed the 1962 Trade Expansion Act and after whom a major round of liberalizing GATT negotiations was named; and Bill Clinton, who signed NAFTA in to law.
On the other side, the progressive movement’s labor and environmental wings often have at best a transactional relationship with free trade, and at worst an outright hostility to it. Many younger people with social democratic leanings, as well as the older generation of presidential candidates, such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, have views on trade that are almost identical to President Trump’s. This is a problem Clausing seeks to address.
She mostly makes the usual economists’ arguments in favor of free trade and immigration. This is fine; trade scholars are not her intended audience, progressives are. Clausing’s progressive credentials help to open the ears of an audience that is often closed to similar messages from different messengers. One particular reason that should resonate more than it does is that free trade and liberal immigration are extremely effective anti-poverty policies. And here, Clausing does a good job of explaining why. But she encounters two problems in her book, one of which is not her doing.
Part of the problem in getting more progressives to support pro-poor trade and immigration policies ties into a political realignment that is currently happening, as the historian Stephen Davies and my colleague Iain Murray have been arguing. For most of the post-war period, the dominant political debate was capitalism vs. socialism. Most people and political parties placed themselves somewhere on that spectrum, and thought of themselves in those terms. That dynamic is largely gone now. Just as conservatives under Trump are no longer a free-market-lite party, progressives are no longer a socialism-lite party, younger social democrats’ pretensions to the contrary. Their fight is on different grounds now.
People are beginning to realign themselves on a different axis—nationalism vs. globalism. Conservatives are rapidly taking over the nationalist side. But progressives haven’t quite chosen their path yet—this complicate’s Clausing’s job. Part of the problem is personality. Trump provides a strongly nationalist figure for conservatives to rally around. As of this writing the progressive side lacks such a figure, whether also a nationalist or more cosmopolitan. There is not likely room for two nationalist parties, but Democrats still haven’t made their choice. If Clausing pushes them in the cosmopolitan direction, she will have done a major service.
These political realignments happen every few generations. The current realignment is neither the first nor last time something like this will happen. But it does explain an awful lot of strange political bedfellows in recent years. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump essentially have the same immigration beliefs, and for similar reasons. Fox News host Tucker Carlson was surprised to find himself very much agreeing with Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s economic patriotism plan.
Large parts of Open also have little to with trade and immigration. I am unsure of whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Her digressions on taxes, regulations, and inequality are standard-issue, and progressives will find little to object to. On the plus side, this can make her market-liberal trade and immigration stances more palatable, especially to progressives still unsure about their place on the nationalism-cosmopolitanism divide. On the other hand, her proposed regulatory policies would reduce the benefits of open trade and immigration. And her views on inequality focus on ratios, rather than people, precisely opposite the liberal approach that would help the poor. For more on this, see Iain Murray’s and my papers on the subject, “People, Not Ratios” and “The Rising Tide.”
Flaws and all, Clausing has written an important book that has the potential to do a lot of good. Ideally, she will not only nudge progressives in a more free-market direction on trade and immigration policy, she will encourage them to take a more cosmopolitan stance in order to provide an effective opposition to an increasingly nationalist conservative movement.
