What economists have argued for generations is now reflected in public opinion: Americans see free trade as the better alternative to protectionism.

Arecent interview in Foreign Affairs acknowledges: it’s hard to name someone alive today who has had more of an effect on how America thinks about trade policy than Robert Lighthizer. In “The New Trade Order,” he lays out the case against free trade. For decades, he says, Washington chased a free-trade fantasy. The “trifecta of stupid” (his phrase for NAFTA, the WTO, and permanent normal trade relations with China) exposed our markets, caused the “China shock,” and shipped millions of manufacturing jobs overseas. The narrative result is a hollowed-out heartland where wages stagnated while coastal areas like San Francisco and New York City boomed, $27 trillion in wealth signed over to foreigners, and industrial towns so broken that men without college degrees now die eight years sooner than those with them. 

By Lighthizer’s account, our pursuit of free trade has caused all of this. “Nobody really believes in free trade,” he told Foreign Affairs last week, “with the exception of the Harvard economics faculty and a few Anglophone politicians.” This harkens back to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer’s indictment of economic models being a product of “elite consensus,” as opposed to real world evidence.

There’s just one problem. Today, with mountains of evidence, the verdict is in. As we’ve understood for 250 years now, protectionism has not led to the reindustrialization of America, has raised hardly any revenue, and has made us less safe, not more.

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