In the wake of Trump’s never-ending vacillations on tariffs, here are some excerpts from “Shawn Fain Is Right. America Needs to Rethink Trade” by Dustin Guastella at The Nation:

“United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain has many liberals scratching their heads. The longtime critic of Donald Trump who wore a “TRUMP IS A SCAB” T-shirt at the Democratic National Convention last year has come out in support of the president’s favorite economic policy: tariffs. Despite the fact that other leading progressives have expressed extreme alarm at Trump’s plans, Fain has insisted that tariffs are “a tool in the toolbox…to bring jobs back here, and, you know, invest in the American workers.

He’s right, and he’s not alone in thinking this. A group of self-proclaimed “economic patriots” on the left are making a similar case in Congress. Representative Chris Deluzio, a Democrat from Western Pennsylvania who won election in the state’s most competitive district, recently took to The New York Times to plead with his party not to embrace “anti-tariff absolutism” as a response to Trump’s policies. And Representative Jared Golden, a Democrat from a rural Trump-leaning district in Maine, recently made a similar case, arguing, “Tariffs are a first step in rewriting a rigged trade system.”

…Of course, Trump’s tariffs are erratic, and their intended purpose is unclear. They will likely do more harm than good. But that doesn’t mean protectionism is inherently a bad idea. In fact, if the left cannot offer a compelling exit from neoliberal globalization, it will be unable to effectively combat the GOP’s national populism with a social populism of its own. Rethinking trade must be a central part of a pro-worker agenda.

For many union members, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) marks the beginning of US decline. The agreement made it so that money, goods, and labor could flow more freely across the continent. Since it was enthusiastically signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993, manufacturing jobs have drained out of the United States to lower-wage corners of the globe. And NAFTA wasn’t even the worst of it; a succession of trade deals followed, including the admission of China into the World Trade Organization. This led to a collapse of manufacturing jobs in the United States.

In the 30 years since, around 90,000 US manufacturing plants have been shuttered. The impact on the labor movement has been disastrous. In 1990, around 20 percent of workers in the US belonged to a union; by 2024 that rate had plummeted to around 9 percent, a record low. The decline of manufacturing and union density combined with looser border restrictions that invited hyper-exploited foreign-born workers into the United States have crushed wages, which have been stagnant for non-college-educated workers.

By swapping high-wage often union jobs in manufacturing, for low-wage nonunion jobs in services, free trade has effectively robbed the working class of its social, political, and economic power.

Few industrial unions have been as affected as the UAW. Since the 1990s, the autoworkers have witnessed over 60 major plant closures among the Big Three automakers. Membership in the union peaked at around 1.5 million in 1979. Today, the UAW has around 390,000 members—a 74 percent decrease. Worse, even when the union manages to make inroads in new plants, companies always have an exit option. They can pack up and relocate to places where labor is cheaper.

…By 2016, the populist backlash had arrived. Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders slammed the establishment for disastrous trade deals. And both won a larger share of working-class voters than their establishment counterparts. And the United States wasn’t alone. A recent meta-analysis by political scientists, led by Gábor Scheiring at Georgetown University, found that the surge in populism all over the world is driven by a reaction against the insecurity induced by globalization. While debate remains over whether workers were driven away from the left because of economic issues or cultural ones, with globalization the two phenomena are linked—the same market forces that drove manufacturing to extinction also helped to drive the increasing pace of cultural churn.

…Fain is right when he argues that auto manufacturers can afford to eat the tariffs without passing on price hikes. Consider that, despite labor-saving automation, manufacturers were charging record prices for a new car before tariffs—in some cases 10 points above the general inflation rate. Where is that money going? Into auto-industry profits that have grown over 50 percent since 2019—despite depressed sales. Fain is right that the industry has “excess capacity” and that tariffs “could bring work back in very short order” by reopening recently closed or underutilized plants. And he’s right that tariffs, combined with an effective industrial policy, could boost workers’ wages, not just in the auto industry but across the board. But more than all of this, Fain is right that we need to restore democratic sovereignty over our economy.

…Too many liberals are now rejoicing at Wall Street’s rejection of the tariffs as if “the markets” are a substitute for democratic input. But plunging stocks only prove what we already knew: that high finance is loath to get off the free-trade gravy train…

but the left can’t fall into the trap of letting Wall Street set the terms of the debate. To match Trump’s national populism, we need a social populism of our own. We should not retreat to advocating for free trade as a response to stock market panic but advance to a conversation about industrial planning. We need a program that seeks to repatriate American finance, claw back the trillions in taxes lost to offshore banking, and reinvest in US jobs.

The tariff is one of the tools we need to rebuild the economy in favor of the working class.”

Click here to read more of Guastella’s article in the Nation.