The problem with the 'progressive' case for tariffs

Vox

11-04-2025

is a senior correspondent at Vox. He covers a wide range of political and policy issues with a special focus on questions that internally divide the American left and right. Before coming to Vox in 2024, he wrote a column on politics and economics for New York Magazine.
Or at least, they are bitterly bickering over what their party's stance on trade should be.
Last week, as 'Liberation Day' unraveled global markets, House Democrats defended several aspects of Trump's trade ideology on social media. In a video posted by the caucus's X account, Rep. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania explained that Washington's failed 'free trade' consensus — the steady lowering of tariff barriers over the past 80 years — had constituted a 'race to the bottom' that 'hollowed out our industrial power' and 'cost us good jobs.'
Nevertheless, Deluzio argued that Trump's 'trade strategy has been chaotic' and 'inconsistent.' America did need tariffs — but ones that were carefully targeted and paired with pro-union policies and government subsidies.
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Some progressives, on the other hand, appreciated Deluzio's nuance. In their account, acknowledging the failings of free trade — and the necessity of supporting domestic manufacturing — was a precondition for persuading working-class voters to trust Democrats on the issue.
This debate collapses together two distinct questions:
1) Is Deluzio's analysis right on the merits?
2) Is his message a politically optimal one for Democrats at the national level?
I think the answer to both of these is 'mostly, no.'
Free trade did not hollow out American industry
Deluzio's case for moderate protectionism can be broken down into (at least) three different claims:
Free trade agreements hollowed out America's industrial capacity.
Free trade has been bad for American workers.
Tariffs are a useful tool for advancing economic justice, since they help prevent a global 'race to the bottom,' in which corporations search for the world's cheapest and most exploitable labor.
I think these claims are all largely — though not entirely — wrong. Let's examine each in turn.
It's not clear precisely what it means for a nation's 'industrial power' to be 'hollowed out.' But presumably, Deluzio means that trade has sapped America's power to produce industrial goods.
And it's certainly true that foreign competition and offshoring have shuttered many US factories, depressed manufacturing employment, and reduced domestic production of some goods.
Still, Deluzio's rhetoric is misleading on two levels. First, trade has not been the primary cause of falling manufacturing employment. Rather, this is mostly attributable to economic development: When countries get richer, consumers spend a smaller share of their incomes on goods, and a higher share on services (people only need so many dishwashers, while their appetite for better health or longer lives is nearly inexhaustible). Which means that, over time, the economy needs fewer people to work in factories, and more to work in hospitals, nursing homes, child care centers, and other service-sector industries.
Meanwhile, automation has progressed more rapidly in goods production than in services. Together, these two forces have dramatically reduced manufacturing's share of employment in all wealthy countries, including those with the most protectionist trade policies.
Second, although US manufacturing employment has fallen precipitously, US manufacturing output has not. In fact, such output is much higher today than it was in the 1980s, according to Federal Reserve Economic Data.
Courtesy of Federal Reserve Economic Research
And America remains the No. 2 manufacturing power in the world: Despite being home to only 4.2 percent of the global population, the United States is responsible for roughly 16 percent of global manufacturing output.
One can quibble with these figures, which conceal major shifts in the types of goods that America produces. But I don't think most people would look at this data and conclude that America's industrial power had been 'hollowed out.'
Free trade has benefited US workers as a whole
Deluzio also implies that free trade has been bad for American workers. And there is little doubt that some US communities have been devastated by trade-induced factory closures. But evidence suggests that globalization has been beneficial for American workers as a whole. Even the famous 'China shock' paper — which alerted economists to the concentrated harms of trade liberalization with China — found that most Americans benefited from such liberalization, as access to cheaper goods increased their real wages.
In fact, the median US worker's real personal income — in other words, their annual income adjusted for inflation — was about 18 percent higher in 2023 than it had been when America normalized trade relations with China in 2000, and 38 percent higher than when NAFTA took effect in 1994.
This reality cuts against many popular narratives. But it is intuitive. One hundred percent of Americans consume goods, while less than 10 percent produce them. Even in the 1990s, less than 20 percent of Americans worked in manufacturing. Therefore, trade policies that reduced prices of goods were always likely to materially benefit the vast majority of US workers, even if they did take a toll on American manufacturing.
Tariffs aren't a great tool for making the global economy more just
Deluzio, like many progressives, suggests that tariffs can advance economic justice. After all, free trade enables corporations to 'exploit their workers' abroad, while eliminating good jobs in the United States. Sen. Bernie Sanders recently put the point more explicitly, arguing that America must stop large corporations from moving jobs to 'low-wage countries.'
There may be some circumstances in which trade restrictions — or at least, the threat of them — can yield progressive outcomes. For example, during Trump's first term, the US threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico if it did not agree to a new version of NAFTA, which included enhanced labor rights for Mexican workers. Mexico ultimately embraced this new trade agreement, and its workers have seemingly benefited.
But as a general rule, putting tariffs on goods from 'low-wage countries' does not save poor workers abroad from exploitation so much as it condemns them to more severe poverty. Wages in Vietnam and Bangladesh are extremely low by American standards. Yet they are much higher than they were before those countries became major exporters. In fact, as Vietnam and Bangladesh have become more integrated into the global economy, their poverty rates have fallen dramatically. As the progressive economist Joan Robinson once quipped, 'The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.'
We should aspire to a world with higher baseline labor standards. Workers in poor nations should not have to choose between hyper-exploitation and impoverishment. But slapping high tariffs on goods from low-wage countries will not change the fundamental dynamics of global capitalism. Rather, such a policy would simply increase global poverty, while raising consumer prices in the United States, thereby reducing the real wages of almost all American workers.
It is hard to see a progressive case for prioritizing the interests of some small subset of US workers (such as those facing low-wage, foreign competition in manufacturing) over the interests of both the global poor and the American working class, especially since there are other ways of improving blue-collar Americans' economic fortunes, such as expanding collective bargaining rights and social welfare benefits. There is no reason in principle why working-class Americans can't earn good salaries in service-sector jobs. As policy analyst Matt Bruenig notes, McDonald's workers in Denmark earn higher wages than autoworkers in Alabama.
Tariffs are increasingly unpopular
Even if Deluzio's argument is substantively misguided, it could still be politically wise.
And there is a case for Democrats to signal skepticism of free trade, even as they oppose Trump's approach to curtailing it. Voters have often expressed sympathy for protecting US industry and skepticism of trade's benefits. In a 2024 Pew Research survey, 59 percent of Americans said the United States has 'lost more than it has gained from increased trade with foreign nations.'
And yet, around the same time, a Gallup poll showed 61 percent of American adults saw 'foreign trade' as more of 'an opportunity for economic growth through increased U.S. exports' than as 'a threat to the economy from foreign imports.'
The public's apparently contradictory sentiments about trade had a simple explanation: Most people simply did not have strong opinions about trade policy. In Pew's polling, trade ranked near the bottom of Americans' 2024 priorities.
But Trump's tariffs have changed this. In the last few weeks, America's average tariff rate has jumped from historically low levels to the highest mark since 1909. It would not be remotely surprising if a policy change this gigantic rapidly shifted public opinion on trade. And the available survey data suggests that it has.
In Gallup's current polling, the percentage of Americans who see trade primarily as 'an opportunity' has jumped to 81 percent. Meanwhile, a new survey from Navigator Research shows that Americans disapprove of tariffs by a 28-point margin; last August, they had disapproved by only 11 points. And even before Trump's 'Liberation Day' announcements, the Wall Street Journal's polling showed support for his tariffs falling sharply.
If Trump persists with his current policies, America will likely see both a recession and surge of inflation. And this economic pain will be directly attributable to tariffs. In that scenario, we should expect Americans' weakly held ideological sympathy for protectionism to erode even further.
Related America may be headed for this rare type of economic crisis
For these reasons, Democrats likely don't need to caveat their criticisms of Trump's tariffs, at least at the national level. The party would probably be better off with a more focused message. This doesn't mean defending the ideological abstraction of 'free trade,' but rather, emphasizing that a Republican president has just enacted a historically large middle-class tax hike, which is increasing prices and risking recession.
Ultimately though, I'm not sure that Democrats need to sweat the details here. Swing voters tend to be more politically disengaged than partisans, and are not hanging on every word posted from the House Democrats' X account. For them, rising prices and falling 401(k) values are likely to make the case against Trump's trade policies more eloquently than any Democrat ever could.
Deluzio's argument might still be the right one for his district. But at the national level, his hyperbolic claims about free trade's costs do not look politically necessary. And since such hyperbole arguably helped bring about today's economic woes, Democrats shouldn't needlessly engage in it.