ActRight

"Treason"

For years, supporters of free trade have been trying to reach a bipartisan consensus on the issue. They’ve finally succeeded. Free trade is now unpopular in both parties. Perhaps because I am a conservative, I can at least understand where most conservatives are coming from in their opposition to free trade. Overt displays of nationalism and patriotism (which are not the same thing, by the way) are not merely tolerated on the right, they’re often celebrated. Conservative intellectuals openly extol American exceptionalism, while liberal intellectuals tend to deride the notion. Virtually no Republican politician agonizes over wearing a U.S. flag pin. #ad#Meanwhile, the Left adores cosmopolitanism, the United Nations, and what some people call “transnational progressivism” or “one-worldism.” Conservatives tend to scoff at all of the above, preferring national sovereignty and the American Way. Of course, this stuff can go too far. That “freedom fries” business was silly. Beyond a sincere misunderstanding about how trade works, the emotional case against free trade on the right boils down to “America first.” That phrase has rich historical (and bipartisan) connotations, but let’s leave all that aside. According to the protectionists, free trade is bad for American workers and some American businesses. America should come first. So we should do whatever is necessary to prevent bad things from happening to Americans. If doing so is bad for non-Americans, that’s not our problem. RELATED: The Truth about Trade I think the math on all this is wrong. Free trade is good for most American workers and all American consumers, not just the “1 percent.” Indeed, it is largely thanks to trade that the average American worker is in the top 1 percent of earners in the world. The protectionists are also wrong philosophically. Countries don’t trade with others countries; businesses and consumers transact with other businesses and consumers. Protectionism is corporate welfare by other means. But the point is, I get where conservatives are coming from. #share#I’m more perplexed about where liberals — and in Bernie Sanders’s case, socialists — are coming from. Last I checked, liberals considered themselves “citizens of the world.” Barack Obama’s famous campaign speech in Berlin (which was better in the original Esperanto) was all about the need to tear down the walls between nations. For the last decade, liberals in the Democratic party and the media have invested enormous amounts of time and energy arguing that American citizenship is almost a technicality. The very term “illegal immigrant” is forbidden by most newspaper style guides. RELATED: Free Trade Isn’t a Burden, It’s a Blessing and an Opportunity for American Industry Sanders says that he believes in “fair trade.” What he means is that we can’t be expected to do business with countries that pay their workers a lot less than we pay our workers. He suggested to the New York Daily News this week that we should have free trade only with countries that have the same wages and environmental policies as us, which is another way of saying we shouldn’t trade with poor countries. In practical terms, Sanders wants to keep billions of (non-white) people poor — very poor. If America were a flea market, his policy would be akin to saying, “Poor people of color cannot sell their wares here, even if customers want to buy them.” RELATED: Trade Restrictions and Closed Borders Are Reminiscent of the 1930s International trade, led by the United States, has resulted in the largest, fastest decrease in extreme poverty in human history. Roughly 700 million Chinese people alone have escaped extreme poverty since 1980, and most of that is attributable to China’s decision to embrace the market economy and international trade. Want to keep Africa as poor as possible? Throw up as many trade barriers as you can. Politically, I get where Sanders is coming from. American labor unions hate foreign competition. Democrats, meanwhile, don’t mind importing poor foreign laborers because they believe those workers will become Democratic voters. But importing goods made by those same foreign laborers if they stay in their home countries? Outrageous! #related#One irony to this all of is that despite all the textbooks that claim nationalism and socialism are opposites, the reality is that when translated into policy, they’re closer to the same thing. The rhetoric may be different, but the economic program of nationalism is socialism, and the emotional underpinnings of socialism boil down to nationalism. For instance, Sanders wants socialized medicine. Well, what is the difference between socialized medicine and nationalized health care? Spelling. I’m no fan of Donald Trump and I think he’s wrong on trade. But at least he’s honest when he admits he’s for America first. — Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. You can write to him by e-mail at [email protected], or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Here we go again.

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Hillary Rodham Clinton says Bernie Sanders is not qualified to be president. Senator Sanders says Mrs. Clinton is not qualified to be president. Both of them are correct, but there’s a bit more to the question. Mrs. Clinton is a lifelong political grifter who poses as a feminist champion while riding on the coattails of her husband, an old-fashioned intern-diddling patriarchal chauvinist who just happens to have been the most gifted politician of his generation before his decline to his current diminished state. Like that of Michelle Obama, Mrs. Clinton’s so-called career in the private sector and in activism rose in neatly incremental tandem with her husband’s elevation through the ranks of political office. If you believe Mrs. Obama was being paid three-hundred grand-plus for vaguely defined administrative work or that Mrs. Clinton’s legal and cattle-futures-trading careers thrived without their patrons taking notice of the vast political power accumulated by their husbands, you are a naïf. #ad#Mrs. Clinton over the years did successfully exploit her marriage to a powerful and vile man into two notable positions of her own: senator from New York and secretary of state. As a senator, she was — at best — undistinguished, merely punching the clock as she prepared to run for the presidency. Unfortunately for her, an equally ambitious nobody senator from Illinois was following the same program, and he is a better politician than she is. As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton was catastrophic: Our allies were alienated, our enemies emboldened, our diplomats abroad slaughtered like livestock. Our national reputation is in tatters and our international prestige greatly diminished, thanks in no small part to her incompetence and that of the president she served. RELATED: Hillary’s Still Weak On top of that, she managed to violate a half-dozen national-security statutes, a fact for which she very well may, despite the best efforts of Obama’s Department of so-called Justice, face criminal charges. What are her other qualifications for the office? Earning $6,000 a minute giving speeches to investment bankers? Sanctimony? Charm? Please. #share#Senator Sanders’s own thoroughly bonkers curriculum vitae is hardly more impressive. He doesn’t seem to have done much of anything at all with his life until he entered politics full time in his forties. He is the author of a great deal of political commentary that might be charitably described — charitably! — as lighthearted meditations on the erotic potential of gang rape. He has forwarded daft theories that women suffer from cancers of the reproductive system because of orgasmic insufficiency. His pornographic imagination — Fifty Shades of Red — is some creepy stuff, indeed. He is in thrall to the usual lifestyle-leftist terrors about GMO foods and the like. Sanders doesn’t seem to have done much of anything at all with his life until entered politics full-time in his forties. Senator Sanders presents himself as the great scourge of Wall Street and the financial sector. But examine his actual legislative record and you will find almost nothing of any substance proffered on the subject. Until the financial crisis of 2008–09, his big idea on banking reform was — sound the victorious trump! — putting caps on the fees banks charge for cash withdrawals at ATMs. Asked by the editorial board of the New York Daily News — not exactly a bunch of raving right-wingers — about his stated desire to break up American financial institutions, and specifically about what legal authority a president might have to do such a thing, Sanders was unable to name a single law, provision, or proposal empowering him to do what he proposes. He seemed to believe that the president could simply order the Federal Reserve — an independent institution — to do so, and, when challenged about whether a president has that legal authority, whimpered, “Well, I believe you do.” I’d bet a fair sum of money that the man who proposes to revamp the rules under which American finance is conducted could not explain what a derivative is or how a credit-default swap works. Hell, I’m surprised he has a checking account. RELATED: Sanders Has Few Options for a Cruz-Style Insurgency If you’re curious about how this is going to unfold, I recommend reading Michael A. Lindenberger’s utterly craven assessment of the kerfuffle in the Dallas Morning News. Lindenberger insists that Senator Sanders should retract his criticism of Mrs. Clinton and apologize. That Mrs. Clinton has made the same claim about Senator Sanders apparently merits no apology. Lindenberger anticipates Mrs. Clinton’s own first line of defense — cries of sexism — writing: “Women have heard this line long enough.” As if the fact that some women (mainly female political allies of Mrs. Clinton) find a line of criticism displeasing means the criticism itself is invalid. Sure, Senator Clinton voted for an Iraq War that good progressives such as Michael Lindenberger, Senator Sanders, and Mrs. Clinton herself now consider to have been a foreign-policy disaster of world-historic proportions, yet Lindenberger insists that it is somehow unfair to criticize Mrs. Clinton for “a 13-year-old vote on the war.” But there is no such thing as a free war, and wrongheaded military decisions do not mellow with time like a new Bordeaux with too much bite. Mrs. Clinton has had many opportunities to exercise her judgment and her keen diplomatic acumen. The results of that are all too plain. Before the emergence of Bill Clinton in 1992, Democrats feared with good cause that the immense popularity of Ronald Reagan and the roaring economic success of those years would shut them out of the White House for a generation. In terms of qualifications for the office, George H. W. Bush had the best résumé since Dwight Eisenhower, arguably a better one. But no one really cares about qualifications. Bill Clinton showed Democrats how to beat better Republicans, and Mrs. Clinton’s entire subsequent political career has been nothing more than a tribute to the victories of her husband, an old-fashioned, back-slapping, horse-trading politician in the mold of Lyndon Johnson and William Fulbright, Bill Clinton’s awful, segregationist mentor. She doesn’t have qualifications: She has a reserved first-class seat on some truly excellent coattails and a great many stamps on her passport. #related#Bernie Sanders’s political career has been something like an organic hobby-garden that suddenly overgrows its plot. He was mayor of Burlington, Vt., essentially a retirement home for addled hippies with a population less numerous than the membership of Lakewood Church in Houston. He is a practitioner of the politics of conspiracy theory and class envy, a professed socialist who doesn’t know the first thing about the laws and regulations relevant to the issues he says are most important to him. He is innumerate and economically illiterate, and about one step removed from walking down Pennsylvania Avenue in a sandwich board. His main qualification is that he is not Hillary Rodham Clinton, which is a good thing to be in a party whose most energetic members are sick to death of Clinton Inc. and whose political infrastructure is divided between an ascendant Obama faction and a moribund Clinton faction. Those, in brief, are the qualifications of Mrs. Clinton and Senator Sanders. White House? She’s more qualified for a jailhouse, and he for a madhouse. — Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.

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