But the most serious inaccuracy in the Brooks piece is the claim that "once there was a bipartisan consensus behind free trade." This is not true. The bipartisan consensus was behind trade policies that put less educated workers in competition with low-paid workers in the developing world. There has never been support for measures that would put our investment bankers, our lawyers, our doctors and our columnists in direct competition with workers in the developing world. (Perhaps Brooks does not know that if I opened a newspaper, and staffed it with foreign reporters and columnists who I quite explicitly paid one-half the wage of their comparably qualified U.S. counterparts, I would be arrested.)
The public has turned against trade policies that were designed to lower the wages of middle class workers and have had this effect. Brooks is among the small group of people who have benefited from these trade policies. Now he is unhappy, that's the story.
The "bipartisan consensus" was pushed into policy by The DLC and the Clinton-Gore Administration's enthusiastic support of trade agreements such as NAFTA. Neither Hillary nor Obama differs significantly with this "bipartisan consensus" on trade policy as a means of depressing wages for the benefit of Wall Street oligarchs. So, in a sense, they are exactly the kinds of candidates Brooks can get behind.
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