Trade Debate Highlights Parties’ Historic Role Reversals : NAFTA: Issue shows how far Democrats and Republicans have shifted in their ideological stands on lower tariffs and protectionism.

Whether the North American Free Trade Agreement is approved or rejected in the House today, the vote is certain to mark another milestone in the two parties’ historic reversal of roles on trade.

For most of their history, the Democrats have been most committed to lowering trade barriers. The Republicans were born as a protectionist party--and remained immovably so for a century. But in today’s vote, it is a foregone conclusion that most votes against the agreement will come from Democrats--using arguments commonly voiced by Republicans in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Swimming upstream against this partisan current has placed President Clinton in an unusual and precarious position: pressing a major international initiative against opposition that is centered in his own party. In the face of the widespread Democratic skepticism about the economic wisdom of the agreement, Clinton has sought consciously to win support by broadening the terms of debate: The President is framing the decision as a test not only of America’s economic strategy but of its commitment to the internationalist vision built around active engagement with the world that has defined national policy since World War II.

In his campaign for the trade accord, “Clinton has really put himself in the (Franklin D.) Roosevelt, (Harry S.) Truman, and (Dwight D.) Eisenhower tradition,” says investment banker Robert D. Hormats, a former senior international economics official in both Republican and Democratic administrations. “These were presidents who understood that a more open world, a more open global economy, is in the interest of the United States.”

The agreement may rise or fall today largely on whether Clinton has made enough progress at reversing a generation-long erosion of that conviction among Democrats.

Only rarely in American history has a President’s own party provided the principal resistance to one of his top foreign policy priorities. Previous examples--most prominently the resistance of Democratic liberals to Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War--have sometimes foreshadowed challenges in the primaries to sitting presidents, though it is not apparent that the trade agreement will leave wounds deep enough to inspire a revolt from the populist left against Clinton in 1996.

Like most trade legislation, the vote does not constitute a pure test of free trade sentiment. To broaden support for the deal, Clinton has accepted protections for anxious industries, like Florida citrus and vegetable growers, and cut an unknown number of other deals with recalcitrant representatives. But even with those concessions, most analysts agree that the vote offers a clear referendum on whether legislators believe the nation is best served by accelerating or resisting the integration of the global economy.

Neither party is monolithic on that question. Dozens of Republicans will vote against the agreement today; dozens of Democrats will support it. But Democrats are leading the opposition to the treaty and it is virtually certain that more than half of House Democrats will vote against it, while as many as two-thirds of Republicans will support it.

This alignment turns on its head the partisan divisions on international economics for well over 150 years and reflects, above all, the changing views of American business and labor about trade.

Though always divided, the Democrats through the 19th Century--especially after the rise of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s--were consistently the most free-trade oriented of the major parties. By contrast, the center of opinion in each of the 19th Century’s business-oriented parties--first the Federalists, then the Whigs and finally the Republican Party that succeeded them in the 1850s--leaned toward higher tariffs and protection.

This partisan division persisted through most of this century. After Republican President William McKinley raised tariffs, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson lowered them. Through the 1920s, Republicans raised tariffs again, culminating in the legislation that has become synonymous with protectionism: the Smoot-Hawley Act, guided through Congress by its two Republican sponsors and enthusiastically signed into law by Republican President Herbert Hoover.

When Franklin Roosevelt sought to chip away at those high tariffs with the reciprocal trade acts of 1934 and 1937, roughly 90% of the votes against the measures in the House came from Republicans. Even as late as 1962, when John F. Kennedy pushed through the Trade Expansion Act that led to the “Kennedy Round” of international tariff reductions, three-fourths of the no votes in the House came from Republicans.

But by 1962, the parties already were shifting direction: one-third of Northern Democrats voted against Kennedy on the trade act. By 1973, when Richard Nixon sought congressional approval for another round of international tariff reductions with the enthusiastic support of Republicans, a majority of Democrats voted no.

By the 1980s, congressional Democrats--particularly in the House--were pushing measures to impose punitive tariffs on countries alleged to be practicing unfair trading practices and Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush were preaching (if not always practicing) the free-trade gospel of Democratic Presidents Grover Cleveland and Franklin Roosevelt.

This partisan reversal followed the shift of attitudes on trade by business and labor after World War II. Historically protectionist, American business opened toward free trade as it expanded across the globe in the 1950s and 1960s. As business shifted, so did the GOP.

Labor, which had traditionally been divided over trade, supported open markets in the period immediately after World War II as a means of breaking down barriers for the exports pouring out of the world’s most powerful economy.

But as the pressure on American jobs intensified from both low-cost imports and decisions by domestic manufacturers to move production abroad, the union movement shifted decisively into the anti-free trade camp and moved the Democratic center of gravity with it.

Against this powerful trend in his campaign for the trade pact, Clinton has appealed to a party tradition with longer roots: the Democratic conviction--which stretches back from Franklin Roosevelt to Wilson to Thomas Jefferson--”that sees commerce as inherently peaceful and maintains the more we trade with other nations the less likely we are to go to war,” as John Milton Cooper Jr., a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, puts it.

One senior White House official said that one key reason for Clinton’s improving prospects of ratification has been his success at portraying the agreement through that lens--as a test of America’s willingness to promote international order by remaining engaged with the world.

“When you frame it as engagement vs. isolationism it just puts everything in a larger context,” the official said. “Lots of members can look at it and say it’s a wash economically, but when you add the foreign policy dimension it becomes very compelling.”

But the debate also has seen a surprisingly powerful revival of the economic nationalist arguments that Republicans venerated in the late 19th Century. In a distant echo of McKinley’s fulminations against Democrats doing the bidding of the British, conservative populists like Ross Perot and Patrick J. Buchanan have argued that free trade imperils America’s security and free traders place the interests of foreign nations above our own.

Those arguments have not yet found much support in Congress; even Republicans opposing the agreement are seen largely motivated by local economic concerns.

But the long debate has revealed a substantial public audience for the economic nationalist case that may pose a long-term political challenge to Clinton’s vision of increasing prosperity by lowering trade barriers around the world.

Indeed, if the trade agreement is defeated, it would mark the reversal of the most powerful trend in trade politics in this century: Since the Depression, no major piece of protectionist legislation has been signed into law, notes Robert A. Pastor, a professor of political science at Emery University, who has written a history of U.S. trade law. “The dominant factor in U.S. trade policy since Smoot-Hawley . . . has been a sense that protectionism was self-defeating,” he said.