Free Trade and the Democratic Primary in the 1980s

This paper will examine the influence of leftist populists on the Democratic coalition in the 1980s through the lens of trade policy. It will also consider the primary as a pivotal political event, one in which the would-be nominees tested out messaging that the party as a whole was reluctant to embrace. Jesse Jackson’s famous appeal to the “the desperate, damned, disinherited, disrespected and despised” struck a sharply different tone than the self-proclaimed neoliberal Democrats’ appeals to the ever-elusive swing-voting Reagan Democrat.

Comparing the campaigns of populist candidates like Jesse Jackson and Dick Gephardt with those of Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, and Michael Dukakis, this paper will focus on the debates that transpired among Democratic leaders and voters over the future of the party’s economic agenda at a time when free trade became increasingly contentious. Between Democrats’ failure to address the stagflation of the 1970s and the party’s embrace of globalization and the New Economy in the 1990s, pivotal struggles took place about the position and power of labor—staunchly opposed to free trade—within the party.

The eighties witnessed candidates make gestures at being “tough on trade” in order to court the labor vote, exploiting the mass appeal of protectionist measures—and the xenophobia that could undergird them. Democratic populist rhetoric about tariffs protecting American jobs was certainly not new in the 1980s, in many ways evoking a conversation that had been hashed out a century earlier. But this message took on new urgency as manufacturing jobs continued to decline and the trade deficit grew. Tensions over imports of Japanese automobiles and electronics erupted into outright xenophobia.