The real threat from Trump

Let the pundits debate whether Donald Trump will succeed in his hostile takeover of the Republican party or can be stopped by wheeling and dealing on the floor of the party’s convention in July.

Let them declare that Hillary Clinton is the inevitable Democratic nominee for president, and write off Bernie Sanders as a no-hope single-message candidate.

What should get the attention of Canadians amid the sturm und drang of this continually amazing presidential contest is the fact that no matter who wins the White House, the United States is being swept by a wave of protectionist feeling unprecedented in modern times. And for a heavily trade-dependent nation like Canada, that spells trouble on the horizon.

All the leading presidential candidates, in both parties, have signed up to the message that trade is bad for ordinary American workers. Donald Trump has, no surprise, been the loudest, declaring that “foreigners are killing us on trade” and vowing to do away with “America’s disastrous trade practices.”

Bernie Sanders likewise thunders against trade deals that have been “a disaster for the American worker.” Barring a miracle, he won’t be the Democrats’ nominee, especially after Clinton defeated him decisively on Tuesday night in the key primary states of Florida and Ohio. But Sanders has managed to push Clinton sharply to the left, and she now promises that Americans won’t be left “at the mercy of what any country is going to do to take advantage of our markets.”

It’s clear why this dark, suspicious mood is dominating the U.S. political season. Tens of millions of Americans have been effectively cut loose by their own country, abandoned to the shocks of the global economy. They were promised new prosperity by the apostles of globalization, but are living a very different reality.

A couple of striking statistics cited this week by Jared Bernstein in the New York Times make that clear. Real wages for U.S. blue-collar manufacturing workers have been flat for the past 35 years, while productivity in the sector has increased by more than 200 per cent. Where did the extra wealth go? To wily foreigners who have outsmarted Washington on trade, if you believe Trump. Or to Wall Street and the fabled “one per cent,” if you listen to Sanders.

There’s a lot more to Trump’s toxic appeal, of course. There’s thinly disguised (sometimes undisguised) racism, resentment against so-called “political correctness,” a feeling that America is no longer respected and feared in the world, and anger at the political dysfunction in Washington.

But there’s little doubt he has tapped into real grievances among mainly white, less-educated voters who have been kicked to the side of the road as the United States motored into the brave new world of trade deals, technology and globalization. Their plight is made all the worse by the absence of a decent social safety net, like those that keep Canadians and most Europeans from falling right to the bottom.

In truth, there’s lots of evidence that trade as such is not the problem. It creates wealth, drives productivity, keeps prices low and has lifted billions around the world out of abject poverty. Cancelling trade deals would not end globalization or do away with the new technology that has destroyed millions of American jobs. But that’s way too nuanced for a demagogue like Trump. It’s not what angry voters want to hear.

More to the point, their rage is a political force of its own. Whether the president who takes over from Barack Obama next January is Clinton, Trump or another Republican, she or he will be propelled by what Marco Rubio, as he took himself out of the race on Tuesday, described as the “political storm” of 2016. The new Congress will also be shaped by that anger.

The danger for other countries, including Canada, is that an inward-looking, protectionist United States could set off a disastrous trade war that would risk sweeping away the benefits of freer trade. Trump himself threatens to impose high tariffs on goods imported from China and Mexico, something that would both raise prices dramatically and inevitably lead other countries to block U.S. goods in retaliation. He may be just blowing smoke, “art of the deal”-style, but these things can easily spin out of control.

Many Canadians have their own suspicions about new trade deals. But our country is even more trade-dependent than the United States, with imports and exports worth a staggering $1.1 trillion a year, and an estimated one job in five tied to trade. Few countries have as much to lose as we do if our neighbour and biggest trade partner turns away from the wider world.

It has happened before in living memory (it was called the Great Depression), and it wasn’t pretty.

What should get the attention of Canadians is that the United States is being swept by a wave of protectionist feeling unprecedented in modern times