Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) talks with reporters on Capitol Hill, March 17, 2020.
The Republican belief in nationalism and the Republican belief in laissez-faire economics are beginning to collide.
So long as Republicans confined their nationalism to a disdain for others—immigrants, minorities, those kinds of people—their support for corporate globalism could coexist comfortably with whatever bigotries they chose to stoke. In the past few years, however, a group of younger Republicans has noticed, however belatedly, that the flight of American industry abroad has immiserated many a Republican worker. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was one of the first to break ranks, calling for restrictions on corporate flight and for industrial policies that favor domestic production. With America’s dependence on Chinese industry now highlighted by the shortages that the coronavirus has exposed, Rubio has been joined by senatorial colleagues Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri.
Yesterday, Hawley authored an op-ed in The New York Times that called for abolishing the World Trade Organization—the creation, chiefly, of American corporate interests to facilitate their expansion into foreign markets, their employment of low-cost foreign labor, and their immunity from any legal restrictions that governments might impose on their right to maximize profits any way they saw fit. As Rubio, Hawley, and Cotton have all noted, we even depend on foreign nations for key components in our military arsenal.
Also yesterday, the GOP old guard answered back in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm and current Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, which viewed the volume of capital flow between nations as a measure of general prosperity, and “free trade” as invariably enhancing the general good.
The newfound concern of Hawley, Rubio, and Cotton for American workers is touching; would that it extended to such issues as these workers’ ability to take paid sick days, make a living wage, and form unions. After all, it was the unions that warned as far back as the 1980s that the free-trade policies America was pursuing would gut the nation’s working class. Indeed, when it comes to the anti-WTO-ers’ apprehension that even our national-security technology has been offshored, they might acknowledge that some of us have been banging this drum for a while. As I wrote in a 2006 Prospect article:
[T]he U.S. armed forces have unparalleled night-vision capacity because of the work of U.S. scientists with cadmium mercury telluride semiconductor materials. The manufacturers of such materials, however, are located in Japan, and now the research scientists have moved there, too. The army may claim to own the night, but, in actuality, it’s renting it.
Too bad these guys weren’t reading the Prospect back then; they might have figured this stuff out sooner. Who knows? They might not even be Republicans today.