Promoting Engagement throughout the World Without Sacrificing our Values at Home

In politics, perception is reality. And for voters in the industrialized Midwest, the reality is that free trade and globalization have caused a generation of economic decline and stirred a deep resentment about our rapidly-changing, ever-shrinking world.

This anger boiled over last November when voters in my home state of Ohio helped to give Donald J. Trump his Electoral College victory. This was one of the few unsurprising results on election night as polls leading up to November 8 had Ohio trending toward Trump.

No other state has more consistently mirrored the country’s choice for president. Since 1964, Ohio has correctly picked the winning presidential candidate — and unfortunately this streak continued in 2016. However, after Barack Obama won Ohio twice, it was hard to understand why Ohio was one of the least competitive swing states leading up to Election Day.

From Trump’s not-so-subtle race baiting to Vladimir Putin’s declaration of war on American democracy, there was no shortage of consequential issues that influenced the outcome of this election. But if there is one issue that caused Ohio to break more convincingly for Trump, it has to be the issue of international trade.

The United States has lost 57,000 manufacturing facilities and over 5 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA was passed in 1994, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Ohio alone has lost a net total of 323,308 of its manufacturing jobs during that same time. Of these, only 43 percent of Ohio workers qualified for Trade Adjustment Assistance, a financial assistance program specifically for those whose jobs were displaced by trade.

There is no doubt that establishing economic relations throughout the world is an important strategic necessity for the United States. International engagement — a key component of the Truman Doctrine — doesn’t just help us export goods, it also helps us to export freedom and democracy throughout the world, but at what cost?

The challenge the United States faces is that our strengths are very different than the countries with which we trade. We have the advantage of capitol, innovation, and technology. Our trading partners have a lower cost of doing business because of weak regulatory systems and cheap labor markets. The inevitable result is that companies chase cheap labor and weak regulations by moving their manufacturing facilities overseas.

In addition to an erosion of manufacturing in the last few decades, we’ve have also seen an explosion of wealth consolidation and income inequality. The United States now has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth among its peer countries, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Over the last 30 years, the top 1 percent has increased its share of the economic pie from 10 to 23 percent. During that same time the bottom 90 percent saw its share shrink from 65 to 50 percent, according to Pew Research. Not surprisingly, this inequality is even more acute by race. The gap in median household incomes between blacks and whites has grown from $19,000 in 1967 to $27,000 in 2011 (as measured in 2012 dollars).

The 2016 election result, at least in Ohio, was a manifestation of the anger that many working- and middle-class voters feel about globalization. Trade can be an important economic and strategic engagement tool to promote democracy and stability throughout the world. But we must reckon with the reality that for many Americans, trade has done more harm than good.

As Donald Trump begins to take us down the path of disengagement, the Truman community’s ability to articulate and promote the importance of liberal internationalism has never been more important. But we can’t continue to champion economic engagement by promoting bad trade deals that hollow out the American middle class and undermine our values at home.

Keary McCarthy is the President and CEO of Innovation Ohio, a policy and advocacy non-profit based in Columbus, Ohio. Prior to joining Innovation Ohio, McCarthy has served as Minority Chief of Staff in the Ohio House, Communications Director for the Ohio House Speaker, worked for former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, and as Northeast Ohio Communications Director for Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign in 2008. McCarthy has been a Truman partner since 2012 and lives in Columbus with his wife and two young boys. Views expressed are his own.