Will Dems turn Dobbs-ism into policy?

By ANDREW CASSEL
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
How worried should we be about the Lou Dobbs Democrats?
The term jumped out from one of last week's post-election analyses. It's a label that applies to at least a good-size handful of the folks who will make up the new majority on Capitol Hill next year.
Who's a Lou Dobbs Democrat? As Jacob Weisburg writes in the online journal Slate, it's someone who campaigned successfully on the same themes that Dobbs, the CNN host, has used to successfully boost his nightly cable ratings: Anti-trade, anti-immigrant, anti-globalization and furiously anti-any business that invests around the world rather than at home.
For example, Sherrod Brown, who beat a Republican incumbent to win a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio, wrote a campaign book called "Myths of Free Trade," blasting NAFTA, CAFTA, the WTO -- all the deals we've made over the decades to cut tariffs and boost global commerce.
Similar themes cropped up in a number of races. Candidates rightly sensed voters' deep and widely shared anxieties about their own, and the nation's, economic future.
But will it now translate into policy? Was Dobbs-ism just a tactic to bring out the base -- doing for the Democrats what gay marriage did for the GOP in 2004? Or will Democrats really manage to turn the tide and make globalization stop dislocating American jobs?
Actually that's a silly question. Of course they can't. The real issue is whether Washington -- no matter who's in charge -- will deal with globalization smartly or stupidly.
We could see more knee-jerk economic nationalism, of the sort that erupted early this year over the Dubai Ports deal. There could be more threats to penalize China for its trade success (which, of course, involves penalizing Americans with higher prices for Chinese-made products).
Flashpoint
A possible flashpoint could be the issue of trade-promotion authority, which allows the president to negotiate deals with other countries. That authority expires next year, and Congress could refuse to renew it, killing the chances for future free-trade agreements.
Then Lou-Dobbs-Dems could claim a win -- but the losers would be poor people in Latin America, Africa and Asia, whose ability to enter the global marketplace could be set back decades.
One of the biggest ironies is that economic nationalists typically paint big business as the villain, blaming multinational capitalism for abandoning American workers.
But when protectionism actually becomes policy, the biggest winners aren't workers, but capitalists.
Tariffs and other barriers to global trade inevitably reduce competition. Protected from overseas rivals, domestic firms grow fat and lazy, able to raise prices for less-than-world-class goods. Consumers lose -- and ultimately workers as well.
There is an alternative to Dobbsism, moreover. Congress can directly tackle the very real worries many Americans have about their future economic security and well-being.
Instead of putting up walls or hoping the rest of the world will somehow go away, Washington can work on sharing the benefits of globalization more equitably.
That means (among other things) progressive tax reform, universal access to health care, a better safety net for dislocated workers, and increased national attention to what economists call "human capital" -- meaning education at all levels, from pre-kindergarten to mid-life career retraining.
If the new Congress really wants to make a difference, it should scrap the Dobbsian rhetoric and listen instead to people such as Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
In a speech last week, Yellen said that "rising inequality is intensifying resistance to globalization, impairing social cohesion and could, ultimately undermine American democracy."
But barriers to trade aren't the solution. Instead, Yellen argued, it's time "for the U.S. to seriously consider taking the risk of making our economy more rewarding for more of the people."
Andrew Cassel is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.