This is from The Economist:
A FEW years ago a wise pollster—pondering how labels like left-wing and right-wing have been scrambled by globalisation—came up with a different way to sort voters in Western democracies. Electorates, he suggested, broadly divide into two groups, one of which sees change and the outside world as a threat, and a second which takes a more optimistic view, looking for opportunities to harness global forces and turn them to good ends. The pollster, Stefan Shakespeare of YouGov, calls these two camps “Drawbridge Up” and “Drawbridge Down” people.
Just after lunch on June 12th President Barack Obama was mugged by the Drawbridge Up bit of America, or at least by its elected representatives. A large majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives, joined by hard-right Republicans, voted to stall (and potentially kill) his hopes of reaching a big new free-trade pact between America and 11 other Pacific Rim nations, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The Senate has already passed a bill that would allow Mr Obama to press ahead with TPP, and the House may return to the question as early as Tuesday.
I love the Economist, but I think this piece gives a very incomplete picture of what's going on. I'm skeptical that this “Drawbridge Up” and “Drawbridge Down” distinction is all that important for explaining the U.S. trade debate.
Don't get me wrong, these categories do exist. There are people in America, on the left and the right, who wish the rest of the world would just go away, and that we didn't have to be bothered by the effects of trade, and interaction more generally, with non-Americans. On the left, this describes some union members; on the right, it's the sovereignty crowd.
On the other side of the issue, there are people who would like to see more economic integration between the U.S. and the rest of the world (I'm in this camp).
But I'm not convinced that either of these groups is more than a minority on the anti-trade agreement or pro-trade agreement sides, and I don't think they are the main groups driving the debate.
Among trade agreement critics, while there are some isolationists, my sense is there are more people -- for example, here -- who have a specific concern about trade governance as it exists now. They think there is too much intellectual property protection, or not enough enforcement on labor/environment, or something along these lines. In one way or another, they don't think we have the right balance of policies in the international economic sphere. But they are not against international economic agreements per se -- they just want these agreements to do different things.
And among trade agreement supporters, I don't get the sense that most of them care all that much about real economic integration. The constant focus on how "exports create jobs" is more of a mercantilist argument. For these people, the drawbridge is one way only. Everyone else should open up; the U.S. shouldn't have to do anything (such as reduce farm subsidies).
In addition, other trade agreement supporters are just looking to create strategic political alliances, which, it seems to me, means building drawbridges for some but not for others.
And finally, many trade agreement supporters see trade as an opportunity to export U.S. "values." It turns out that one of these core "values" is ever stronger intellectual property protection, which -- conveniently! -- helps U.S. exports. Using U.S. economic power to coerce others to adopt a carefully selected handful of what have been declared to be our "values" is not, in my view, consistent with the spirit of "Drawbridge Down."
Modern trade agreements are complex legal instruments. It's hard to get across, in the mainstream public debate, all the issues they cover. You can blog it, or write longer journal articles, but that doesn't attract much attention. It's rare for the big media outlets to think through all the nuances of trade governance (with some exceptions, such as this). The media seems to prefer black and white, good vs. evil. This approach may sell more advertising, but I'm just not sure the world is that simple.
