Elizabeth Warrenbuilt her brand for the 2020 presidential primary on wonkery. From childcare to housing to higher ed, Warren has leveraged decades of economic policy expertise and a network of liberal intellectuals ― many of them former students in Warren’s law school classes ― to propose ambitious, meticulously detailed reforms.
The trade platform Warren unveiled Tuesday in Detroit is a little different. It retains Warren’s wonk-flair with a proposal to reorganize the disparate trade regulators currently scattered throughout the Washington bureaucracy inside a single, consolidated agency. But the heart of her proposal is ideological rather than technical. Warren is making a crystal-clear statement of principles, and an equally plain break with the past 30 years of American trade policy ― up to and including the presidency of Donald Trump.
“America chose to pursue a trade policy that prioritized the interests of capital over the interests of American workers,” Warren told a crowd in Detroit Tuesday. “We have encouraged companies to invest abroad, ship jobs overseas, and keep wages low. All in the interest of serving multinational companies and international capital with no particular loyalty to the United States.”
What matters in Warren’s vision is not the specifics of any particular trade tool or enforcement tactic. Warren isn’t pro-tariff or anti-tariff, for instance. It depends on the tariff. She’s in favor of international rules that are designed to achieve actual policy goals other than corporate profit. What we call “free trade,” she emphasizes, isn’t really a system where governments get out of the way. The rules of international commerce determine its outcomes ― and there is no such thing as a trade regime without rules. When governments agreed to grant 20-year monopolies on life-saving medicines under WTO treaties, for instance, they were not simply allowing nature to take its course — they were setting up a system.
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