Tariffs and trade are not side issues, but a central front in the battle against monopoly power—and for self-government.
Donald Trump’s tariffs are a devastating blow to America, akin to the Covid-19 pandemic in their scope. They will spike consumer prices, hurt small businesses, bankrupt farmers, and have long-lasting extremely damaging macro effects. But there’s another risk, too: that the Trump vortex is warping public debate over trade, sovereignty, and industrial policy.
A handful of influential pundits—Jonathan Chait, Eric Levitz, and Josh Barro among them—are using this moment to dismiss key trade tools altogether. In The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Vox, the three of them conflate Trump’s dangerous and corrupt tariffs with tariffs themselves, with any future-oriented reshoring agenda, and with any serious effort to use trade policy to support new American industries or reduce dangerous dependencies. And their message to Democrats: Don’t even try to reclaim trade as an issue. It’s all Trump-tainted.
Their attempt to use Trump’s disastrous blunder to take over the Democratic Party isn’t surprising. An intra–Democratic Party fight over trade and manufacturing has been going on for decades. The neoliberal wing—which these three represent—was ascendant from Bill Clinton to Obama, but no amount of charts or graphics about cheap prices could convince most Americans that trade liberalization had been good for them. After the crash of 2008, the neoliberals gradually lost power, leaving Obama unable to push through the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Hillary Clinton’s long-standing associations as a globalist was doubtless a factor in her defeat—a lesson not wasted on Joe Biden, who took a strong pro-industrial policy turn in his time in office.
The latest polling (understandably) shows a sharp negative response on tariffs, in contrast to polling as recent as earlier this year. And so the neoliberal wing is up and jumping for the brass ring. Most of their arguments are on politics, not policy. They all correctly point to the short-term backlash, but then try to cement that into a permanent policy shift. They may win the week, but the real threat is that they leverage Trump-fixation to win over Democratic leadership and the 2028 cycle.
Chait is the most explicit in equating all tariffs with Trump’s tariffs. He says Trump is “illustrating the harm of trade barriers.” and “giving Americans a[n]…effective lesson in the virtues of free trade.” Of course, that is not at all what Trump is doing; he is illustrating the harm of radical uncertainty and tariffs untethered from industrial policy. That’s like saying Trump “illustrated the harm” of electric vehicles by buying 400 Teslas for diplomats in an obviously corrupt deal.
According to Barro, the Democratic Party has outsourced trade policy to organized labor, and we can understand support for tariffs as support for specific “interest groups.” He argues that support for tariffs represents “putting the narrow interests” of autoworkers “ahead of the broad interests of the country.” That’s also not true. A strong, future-oriented trade policy is about far more than supporting the UAW. It’s about democracy, and whether we have the power to dictate our own rules. It’s about community, and whether we concentrate all the best jobs in a few mega cities, or have hundreds of midsize cities—like Akron 50 years ago—that had strong local industries and great, move-up-the-ladder jobs.
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The Barro-Levitz-Chait cohort wants to paint anyone who talks seriously about tariffs, industrial policy, or reshoring as flirting with Trumpism. They want to paint all strong tariffs as versions of the ruinous Smoot-Hawley tariffs in the 1930s. That’s a false frame. Trump’s chaotic, personalized trade agenda is certainly extreme. But so is the opposite vision: tariff abolition, with no guardrails, no democratic planning, and no strategy. Real industrial policy—the kind that builds capacity, disperses power, and supports workers—lives between those extremes. That’s the tradition we should be reclaiming.
Think of trade as a global version of anti-monopoly policy. The two have always been part of the same fight—over who holds power in the economy, and who gets to shape its rules. W.E.B. Du Bois understood this, and linked the two in his masterful Black Reconstruction in America. So did Louis Brandeis. So did FDR. All three looked at the world through the lens of power.
But while trade and monopoly have always been entangled, the shape of that entanglement is always changing. In the 19th century, some of the country’s most powerful monopolists—Southern slaveholders and Northern industrialists—supported steep tariffs. These trade barriers weren’t designed to support democratic production or worker dignity. They were designed to protect an extractive economy based on slavery that allowed monopolists to dominate local markets without competition. The late 19th century’s steep tariffs were designed to serve entrenched power.
That changed with the New Deal. The United States treated both anti-monopoly and trade policy as key tools in supporting a flourishing economy and flourishing democracy. The Roosevelt administration didn’t seek to abolish tariffs—or unilaterally impose them. Instead, it used them strategically—to stabilize prices, support domestic manufacturing, protect workers, and expand the middle class. Trade was coordinated with labor law, antitrust enforcement, and capital controls as part of a broader vision of democratic economic governance.
That vision started crumbling in the 1970s, and then wholly collapsed in the 1990s, when trade was handed over to multinational corporations. NAFTA and its successors weren’t just about lowering consumer prices—they were about handing off decision-making power to multinational firms that could pit countries against each other. In the modern era, monopolists no longer want high tariffs. They want no barriers at all, so they can arbitrage labor laws, environmental protections, and tax regimes—playing governments off one another and hollowing out democratic control.
To understand how monopoly and trade are kissing cousins, consider vitamins. Nearly all the key ingredients in basic vitamins—vitamin C, B12, D3—are produced overseas, with over 90 percent of certain key vitamins being produced in China. Those vitamins are essential to basic healthcare—and key components of animal agriculture. Remove access to those vitamins, and huge parts of our society fall into chaos and disease. It’s not just that one factory failure could deny tens of millions of Americans their access to essential nutrients. It’s that China holds that lever over all of us, every day, and could threaten to use it because it disagrees with American policy on speech or who owns the Taiwan Strait.
That’s not “free trade”—it’s forced dependency. And it looks a lot like the concerns that Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter raised about monopolization in book publishing and chicken distribution: It creates a fragile and dependent system, where power chills speech even without doing anything overt. Anti-monopoly advocates have awakened Americans to monopolies in tech, food, and energy. When you consolidate suppliers, cut local production, and abandon domestic capacity, you don’t get freedom—you get fragility. You get five companies controlling baby formula, or four meatpackers setting prices for American farmers. Trade, in this context, becomes the mechanism for monopoly, not its antidote.
In antibiotics, about 90 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients for key antibiotics come from China. The United States no longer makes penicillin. That’s not an accident—it’s the outcome of decades of trade and procurement policy that prioritized short-term cost savings over national resilience. It may be tempting to describe this just as a national security problem, but it goes deeper than that. If any of us—farmer or pharmacist—knows we are deeply dependent, it changes our own sense of autonomy, hope, and the future.
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If a town only has one or two employers, wages stay low and workers lose bargaining power. That’s monopoly. But it’s just as true on the supply side: If a country only has one or two suppliers for a critical good, then we customers lose bargaining power. We lose freedom. We lose control. Whether you are a nurse, a trucker, or a policymaker, you can’t make good decisions when your entire supply of antibiotics or baby formula depends on a single corporation in another country. That’s not industrial policy; that’s a series of hostage situations.
Like the Chicago School economists who tried to turn anti-monopoly into “cheap price law,” the radical vision of Chait and Barro is that trade should be about consumer prices, not power. They advocate ripping down all barriers to cheap consumer goods, and are confident that ultra-globalization is good for America. But just as anti-monopoly law is not just about consumer welfare, trade is not just about prices.
A trade policy that reflects public values would build out of the rubble of Trump. It would identify essential goods, identify workforce potential, identify opportunities and risks, and invest in diversified production. It would use tariffs and procurement and limits on capital flows to support broad-based capacity and economic independence. It would be transparent, not secretive; it would be stable, not mercurial—and it would be democratic, not captured. And yes, it would include industrial policy, currency policy, and capital controls where appropriate.
The anti-monopoly movement has made extraordinary progress in recent years, helping millions see how concentrated power distorts markets, corrupts politics, and undermines freedom. One of the ways it did that is by recognizing that you don’t need to be an economist to engage, as a citizen, on questions of power. Something similar needs to happen in trade. Too many Democrats, afraid of appearing Trump-adjacent, are being pressured to abandon tools that could help build a strong, fair economy.
Trade is too important to be left to corruption, technical expertise—or neoliberal tariff abolitionism. It’s almost impossible to have a non-warped conversation about trade policy, but if we remember the core democratic vision, we can reclaim it, reshape it, and recognize it for what it is: not a side conversation, but a central front in the fight against monopoly power, and for self-government.
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