Democrats Should Own Free Trade, Not Just Oppose Trump's Protectionism
Their tactical opposition to the president's tariffs will cost them leadership on this issue
For too long, American populists on the left and right have treated globalism—the free flow of goods, capital, and people across borders—as a concession to corporate interests, a system to apologize for rather than promote. That defensiveness has become a trap: facing Trump’s assault on the principles of free and open trade, Democrats are pushing back, but on tactical grounds rather than making a full, principled case for free trade. Tariffs raise prices for everyone, reduce employment and output, and weaken the democratic alliances Democrats claim to cherish. In failing to make the principled case against tariffs, Democrats cede the language of economic openness to the very forces dismantling it.
The Supreme Court’s welcome and decisive recent ruling against the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) trade regime provides Democrats with a way out. It provides more than legal relief—it offers a political opening, and Democrats ought to do everything they can to walk through it. Playing tactical anti-Trumpism is certainly alluring in an election year, but this is precisely the time to make a principled, unapologetic case for an open international order. Democrats cannot plausibly project themselves as the party of affordability, abundance, and global security without a confident commitment to trade. To choose protectionism, or even just to allow Trump’s protectionist policies to set the new baseline, is to choose a scarcity mindset that limits growth and cedes the global stage to authoritarian powers.
The ruling did not end the tariff fight: Trump immediately moved to replace the invalidated duties with a 10% global surcharge under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, and his administration has launched Section 301 investigations designed to rebuild a broader tariff regime on more durable legal footing. But the political conditions for a recommitment to open trade are better than they’ve been in a decade.
In recent congressional votes, Democrats demonstrated newfound conviction and unity on tariffs. On Feb. 11, a united House Democratic caucus joined six Republicans to pass a resolution repealing Trump’s tariffs on Canada. Senate Democrats had done the same in November, picking off four Republicans to pass bills repealing tariffs on Canada, Brazil, and other countries—votes that included Democrats who have long opposed trade liberalization.
That posture has only hardened since the SCOTUS ruling. Democrats have introduced legislation to repeal the Section 122 authority Trump is now using to replace the invalidated IEEPA tariffs, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has pledged to block any congressional extension when the 150-day clock runs out this summer. The coming vote will force Republicans to either own the economic consequences of Trump’s tariffs heading into November or break with the president—a choice that polling suggests could be devastating for the party.
Meanwhile, a Democratic study released this week estimates that Trump’s replacement tariff regime will cost American households an average of $2,512 in 2026.
The only question is whether the party will seize the moment or squander it.
What ‘Free Trade’ Actually Is
To make that case credibly, Democrats first have to reclaim the term itself. “Free trade” has always included rules. Trade agreements cover standards for intellectual property, labor, and environmental protection. But free trade opponents in the United States oppose deals not just with nations whose standards are lax, complaining that this will trigger a race to the bottom, but where they are stricter than America’s own, including the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and Canada. When you get to the heart of the matter, the argument against trade agreements is rarely about standards but about something else entirely.
In U.S. political discourse, international trade is often pejoratively labeled as “neoliberal” and “capitalist”—but this framing gets the history almost exactly backwards. As historian Marc-William Palen documents—whose book was reviewed here in The UnPopulist—the intellectual tradition of free trade runs deeper on the left than the right. From Marx and Engels, who endorsed open commerce as a force for working-class internationalism, to the German Social Democrats, radical liberals, and feminist peace movements of the early 20th century, free trade was long understood as an antidote to imperialism, authoritarianism, and war. Economic insularity, by contrast, has historically been the program of conservative nationalists—from Bismarck’s protectionist empire to Trump’s America First doctrine. The vision of a rules-based trading order that Democrats are now hesitant to claim is, in important respects, their inheritance more than anyone else’s.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), renamed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) after the United States withdrew, illustrates what that inheritance looks like in practice. Spanning communist Vietnam, social democracies, and liberal-capitalist nations alike, it sets standards for labor, intellectual property, the environment, and dispute settlement across political systems that share little else in common—a textbook example of the mutual gains trade provides, and of the kind of standard-setting that falls to authoritarian powers like China when the United States walks away. It has already happened: When the U.S. ceded ground in global telecommunications forums, Huawei moved aggressively to set the standards for 5G. The agreement remains open to new members; the U.K. has already joined, and South Korea, Taiwan, and even China are potential candidates.
The economic case reinforces the political one. Free trade raises overall welfare by allowing countries to specialize in what they produce most efficiently, lowering prices, improving quality, and accelerating innovation for consumers and firms alike. These effects compound over time, boosting productivity growth and real incomes—and liberal trade systems constrain authoritarian powers by establishing tangible consequences for violating global economic rules.
Why the Consensus on Trade Frayed in the United States
For decades, free trade was a bipartisan pillar of the post-World War II liberal consensus. The Bretton Woods system embedded open trade in a shared, rules-based monetary order, and that commitment held across administrations of both parties for nearly half a century—through Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes.
The unraveling was also bipartisan. In 2015, eventual Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton turned against the TPP, an agreement her own State Department had helped negotiate, after Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont made opposition to it a centerpiece of his presidential primary campaign. President Trump completed the demolition, withdrawing from the TPP on his first day in office and proceeding to raise tariffs significantly, erratically, and vindictively. President Biden rolled back some of those tariffs but could not muster congressional support to rejoin the TPP despite saying he wanted to. In his second term, Trump has raised tariffs to levels not seen since the 1940s—before the creation of the international system that has produced unprecedented peace and the largest reduction in poverty in recorded human history. Even China lifted roughly 800 million people out of poverty not through autarky but Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms and integration into the global trading system.
The backlash against globalism draws on real grievances, but those grievances are exploited by economic nationalists to construct and push an anti-trade narrative that goes well beyond the facts. The evidence behind the most sweeping version of those grievances is actually weaker than its political traction suggests. The most famous exhibit is the elephant curve, a graph published in 2013 by economists Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, which appears to show that the lower and middle classes in advanced countries like the United States saw little or no income growth from 1988 to 2008 while the global poor and the global elite both gained substantially. The story it seems to tell—that globalization hollowed out the Western working class—became the intellectual foundation for Brexit, Trump, and a generation of populist politics.
But a closer analysis suggests the low growth in the 60th to 80th percentile of the global income distribution was driven largely by idiosyncratic cases: the collapse of the USSR, the economic stagnation of Japan, and the outsized weight of China’s growth miracle, which was driven more by its transition from a state-controlled to a private sector economy rather than trade per se. When those factors are isolated, advanced economies performed very well over the period, with income growth of over 40% across the board. Scholars continue to debate the methodological details, but the confident claim that globalization impoverished the Western working class is not well supported by the evidence. Democrats who want to reclaim the trade argument should not concede this empirical ground—it belongs to them.
The manufacturing employment story follows the same pattern. The long-term decline in manufacturing’s share of the U.S. workforce is a decades-long trend, driven to a large extent by automation, unaffected by the alleged inflection points of NAFTA or China joining the WTO. It is primarily a function of productivity growth, as manufacturing output has actually increased significantly over the same period.
Some trade skepticism reflects the institutional interests of private-sector unions, whose gains in wages, benefits, and job protections are real. But those gains impose costs on workers and consumers below them in the income and wealth distribution—costs that any coalition serious about broadly shared prosperity cannot ignore. Protectionism is not a trade policy that addresses those downstream effects but is a substitute for one.
In recent months, the European Union has finalized sweeping trade deals with South America, India, Indonesia, and Mexico. The EU-India deal covers two billion people and roughly a quarter of global GDP. India could heed calls to join the CPTPP, expanding the bloc into a truly global entity dominated by neither the U.S. nor China. Meanwhile, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney described emerging trade talks between the CPTPP and the EU as evidence that medium-sized economies are building a new order around American absence. The rules governing global commerce are being written now, by others, without us. Every deal struck without American participation is a standard set without American values embedded in it.
A New Vision for Trade
Domestically, the battle is far from won. Opposition to tariffs today is partly a reaction to an unpopular president, and could fade as political conditions shift. Democrats need to offer something more durable than anti-Trumpism: a principled governing vision for trade that can survive the next election cycle.
That vision must be open and responsible. Free trade has always accommodated national security exceptions: advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and robotics represent legitimate carveouts today, as the CHIPS Act’s domestic manufacturing investments reflect. Beyond that, trade agreements create aggregate gains, but those gains have to be matched by genuine attention to the workers and communities who bear the adjustment costs—otherwise the political coalition for openness will always be fragile. The goal is not to slow trade but to ensure that the rules governing it are designed with everyone’s stakes in mind, not just the stakeholders who show up to negotiate. This is what an Abundance agenda can and should look like in practice—not rationing the gains from openness, but expanding the base of people who benefit from them.
'Abundance’ Offers a Sounder Way Forward for the Left than Degrowth or Redistributive Progressivism
Although full-spectrum trade deals between countries are more desirable, the political obstacles can sometimes be insurmountable. Far more realistic than single, sprawling deals that attempt to regulate every dimension of economic exchange at once, requiring everyone to swallow everything simultaneously, an alternative would be so-called modular frameworks that govern specific domains: labor standards, subsidy transparency, digital trade, dispute resolution. Countries and regional blocs adopt these modules individually. Whenever two parties share the same standards in a given domain, their markets connect automatically in that area. Integration thus deepens incrementally, where political support exists, while remaining open to new participants as they converge on shared rules. This modular architecture replaces all-or-nothing globalization with a scalable system that expands cooperation, raises standards through participation rather than coercion, and reduces political fragility.
The political logic is as compelling as the economic one. Each module builds its own constituency. A labor standards agreement advances when there’s a labor coalition behind it. A digital trade framework advances when the tech sector is aligned. No one has to accept everything to get something. In this way, durable international commitments can get built—not through grand bargains that the next administration can unwind but through interlocking agreements that would be harder to dismantle precisely because they are more distributed.
The Digital Economy Partnership Agreement—negotiated by Chile, New Zealand, and Singapore, and since joined by South Korea—already works this way. Rather than a single comprehensive pact, it runs on separate modules: digital identities, e-invoicing, data flows, consumer protection, fintech cooperation. Countries adopt what they’re ready for. Others join as they converge. It is modular trade architecture already in operation.
Reclaiming globalism is the necessary foundation of any forward-looking Democratic governing project. Without it, there is no credible path to abundance and no serious defense of the liberal international order. With it, Democrats can offer something the current moment desperately needs: not merely a reaction to Trump, but a coherent and positive claim on what liberalism stands for.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
 | A guest post by
|
Another classic UnPopulist article.
In explaining “free trade,” the author makes clear that it is, in practice, heavily regulated for labor and environmental reasons (because of course). He then goes on to argue that support for free trade isn’t really capitalist at all but was in fact endorsed by Marx and Engels. “History,” the article confidently claims, has this “almost exactly backwards.”
From there, the author casually conflates “neoliberal” with “capitalist,” which leads to some odd implications: were classical liberals, like the US Founders, actually socialists? When they wrote that government exists to protect the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, were they channeling Marx? Apparently, “history has it backwards.”
So, what we’re left with is an argument for heavily regulated “free” trade, justified in part by Marx and Engels, all in service of UnPopulist’s apparent vision of “freedom authoritarianism.”
Great work, everyone.