WILL DEMOCRATS NOW BE FREE-TRADERS?

Maybe the Marxists are right about one thing: Class does rule. Or, in the Age of Trump, a lack of class.

Exit polls suggest Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections cemented what you might call a “class trip,” a political migration of the educated that’s been underway for a couple of decades. In a slow upending of the traditional “diploma divide,” more-educated American voters have been moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic, while the less educated have gone the other way.

According to the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein, on Tuesday: “Democrats carried only 37 per cent of white voters without a college education (compared to 61 per cent for Republicans). But Democrats won a 53 per cent majority of college-educated white voters (compared to 45 per cent for Republicans).” Granted, 53 to 45 isn’t as decisive a margin as Democrats enjoyed among African-Americans (five to one) or young people (three to two) but in most small-d democratic elections 53-45 is a handy enough victory.

Why the switch? We educated, snooty, elite types, especially the women among us, can’t stand President Donald Trump’s style. As a result, Democrats got the votes of fully 59 per cent of more-educated white women. Of course, many of Trump’s own supporters, especially women, say they’d prefer he ratchet down the boorishness and tweeting. On balance, though, they think his policy victories, especially on conservative court nominations, are worth it. We non-Trumpers think nothing is worth it.

Trump himself, whether by accident or careful strategic design (I suspect by accident) has targeted salt-ofthe-earth, should-be Democrats, perhaps because they were the biggest audience for The Apprentice and so knew and liked him best. They gave him his victory in 2016 and he has doubled-down on them since.

What does the class flip mean for us in Canada? Which boils down to: What does it mean for U.S. trade policy? Will NAFTA 2.0 sail through the new Democratic House of Representatives? Educated people traditionally support freer trade. Educated people now also support the Democrats. So will the Democrats support freer trade?

Unfortunately, the first leg of that syllogistic stool is wobbly. Support for free trade does generally rise with education, but how many people believe in free trade in their gut?

Educated Republicans may support it because they studied business or economics in college or work for firms that clearly benefit from freer trade, whether on the import or export side. But are educated Democrats the same kind of people? Or did they avoid business and economics in college and instead study communications or sociology or one of those fields with “studies” in its name (e.g., Women’s, Gender, Interdisciplinary, Earth, LGBTQ, and so on).

Beyond what people learned in school, free trade is a deviously subtle idea. Even if you did study it, it may not have stuck. Eighty years into the age of Keynes, most people find “Help the economy: Buy local” a much more congenial idea. Trump clearly does.

Paul Krugman himself, the economics Nobelist and New York Times columnist, once wrote an article, “Ricardo’s Difficult Idea,” that grappled with why people in general and intellectuals in particular choke on “comparative advantage.” And it is a truly remarkable idea: Even a country that can do everything better than all other countries nevertheless improves its lot by trading with its inferiors. And the inferiors both survive and prosper from competition with the polymath nation.

Why don’t people grasp that? Krugman offers three reasons, none very encouraging regarding the Democrats’ likely adoption of a freer trade program.

One, “in a culture that always prizes the avant-garde, attacking (accepted wisdom) is seen as a way to seem daring and unconventional.” Democrats paint Republicans as the stodgy party while they’re forward-looking and progressive, so that doesn’t bode well — even if opposition to accepted economic wisdom is so commonplace now that a little revisionism would actually be the daring thing.

Two, comparative advantage is “part of a dense web of linked ideas,” including about “how competitive markets work, what determines wages, how the balance of payments adds up, and so on.” Alas, appreciation for, let alone understanding of competitive markets, including competitive labour markets, is both rare and frowned on these days.

Three, economics has a decidedly math-y feel and humanists resist invasion “by aliens armed with equations and computers” (even if the only computer David Ricardo would have had was a slide rule). Humanists, you’d think, are more likely to be Democrats.

Studies of trade patterns show that what the world wants from the U.S. are things produced by its bettereducated workers. Marxists would argue that’s why educated Americans support free trade. That they often don’t means Marxists err again, though that doesn’t help NAFTA.

EDUCATED PEOPLE TRADITIONALLY SUPPORT FREER TRADE. EDUCATED PEOPLE NOW ALSO SUPPORT DEMOCRATS.