Recently, the Ontario government took the unprecedented step of intervening in American politics. trying split the Republican Party over tariff policy. They did so knowing that there were two strands of GOP views on tariffs: the pro-free trade belief and the pro-tariff belief, which Canadians hope to leverage in their ongoing trade battles with the United States.
This brings me down neatly back on the issue of raising tariffs. Once again, I am analyzing this as a political issue, not an economic one.
The historical Republican Party has been a big fan of tariffs. Abraham Lincoln led them out of the “American system” of the Whig Party, of which he was a prominent supporter. In 1896, the Republican Party doubled their support under the leadership of William McKinley, whom President Trump praised.
After Woodrow Wilson's presidency, Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover everyone preferred them (in my previous column I mistakenly called the first two free traders). It wasn't until 1952 that the great Republican Party included tariffs, when President Dwight Eisenhower came out firmly in favor of free trade. Since then, every GOP president and presidential candidate has been rhetorically pro-free trade, with the exception of Donald Trump.
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Notice that I said “rhetorical free trade.” This is quite significant. All three two-term Republican presidents – Nixon, ReaganAnd Bush II – generally promoted free trade, but used higher tariffs when deemed appropriate.
Or perhaps it should be said that they used higher tariffs when they thought it would help them politically?
That's because, politically speaking, higher tariffs appear to have benefited the Republican Party. From the outset, business interests, which were largely concentrated in the Northeast, were owned by protectionist Republicans. But after the Civil War, with the return of white Southern Democrats (who were prohibited from voting for their rebellion) and the suppression of black Republican voters in the South by white Southern Democrats, GOP strategists realized that they had lost their national majority and that they needed a new way to recreate it by appealing to the swing white voters of the time. These swing voters were “the new ethnic immigrant workers in the North are often Catholic” who found protectionism attractive.
Why did these voters find protectionism so attractive? Well, the concept behind it is easy to understand. A worker working in a business will and should be very concerned that foreign companies are competing with his domestic company and potentially jeopardizing his employer's business and possibly costing him his job (we were talking mostly about male workers back then). Thus, this worker is likely to generally support higher tariffs, especially during tough economic times.
In 1896, GOP strategist Mark Hannah and his client, Ohio Governor William McKinley (the latter known as the “Napoleon of Defense” when he served in the U.S. House of Representatives), ran a presidential campaign that united Republicans and undecided white voters. McKinley was a strong advocate of protectionism and also turned the money issue, which divided the Democratic Party more than the Republicans, into a “wedge issue” to portray Democrats as dangerous radicals who could not be trusted to govern the country.
McKinley's 1896 campaign created a broad national majority for the Republican Party. Only in 1912, when the Republican Party split, did the Democrats manage to regain the presidency. And in 1920, 1924 and 1928, the Republicans regained the presidency and won the popular vote by landslides while maintaining protectionism.
But in 1932, the Great Depression destroyed the Republican Party's majority, and Franklin D. Roosevelt blamed high tariffs as one of the causes of the depression.
Dwight Eisenhower, who was an apolitical general who rose through the ranks under Democratic Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, eventually announced that he was a Republican. But unlike previous Republicans, he embraced Roosevelt's free trade policies. Although Eisenhower was labeled a “moderate Republican” by more conservative critics, Republican conservatives eventually accepted his stance on free trade, which came to be considered the “conservative Republican” position.
But even conservative Republicans have recognized over the years how popular higher tariffs could be, as I mentioned above.
Now President Trump is returning to traditional Republicanism by pushing higher tariffs. I can't comment on whether Trump is doing this for political reasons or out of a fundamental belief that tariffs work (or both). But again, I can say that politically this seems to be a positive thing for him and the Republican Party because we saw with the white working class, as well as How black (male) blue-collar and working-class Latino voters, all of whom have shifted decisively to Republicans over the past decade.
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Trump carried the big swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin two out of three times. And today in these and other difficult states of the working class including New Jersey, which has competitive elections, GOP sees a steady increase in its registration, especially among the working class.
If I were a Democratic strategist, I would be very concerned about Trump's tariff policies. We've seen this play before, and historically it has worked well for the Republican Party. Democrats may want to learn from this history before they are condemned to repeat it.
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