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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

30 years ago it was the left that was criticizing globalism. Apart from a fringe wing of the Republican party [Pat Buchanan, etc.], anybody on the "right" or "center" was doggedly pro free trade until just a few years ago, and those of us on the left who protested the introduction of NAFTA, or opposed the WTO, IMF, or the G7 or (like myself) got teargassed at the Summit of the Americas weren't shouted down and called "racist" but told we were economically illiterate and just you wait, all this free market will make China democratic...

In Canada the only party to consistently oppose NAFTA and the FTA was the NDP, the left wing party.

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Interesting how different two people can come to two completely polar conclusions. I guess it depends on your social bubble, on either side.

In my experience, the right was very opposed to NAFTA (while the left was pushing it), in favor of free trade but not at the expense of jobs and manufacturing ability in the USA, and thought all these deals with China were going to enrich a possibly future adversary. By experience, I simply mean social interaction with middle class conservatives/Republicans, not experience in politics or "the party". And, I didn't really start paying attention to what was going on until the early 90s. (edited for a paragraph break)

I think we have a terminology problem. If you think of Clinton and his Democrats as "left" then, sure, they were/are highly pro-neo-liberal globalization. To the rest of the world outside the US, that's nowhere close to left. They're neo-liberals, not socialists.

That's a good point, thank you.

I remember it the same way, and I was a journalist at the time and wrote many stories about GOP politicians afraid sounding warning bells about American jobs going to Mexico. Which they did. And then they went from Mexico to China.

I also remember that conservative companies like Walmart were so against NAFTA that they actively promoted Made In America goods in store and in advertising. My how times have changed.

I'm 99% sure that historically speaking, the OP is correct. Wikipedia's introduction to NAFTA sums up my recollection:

> The impetus for a North American free trade zone began with U.S. president Ronald Reagan, who made the idea part of his 1980 presidential campaign. After the signing of the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement in 1988, the administrations of U.S. president George H. W. Bush, Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney agreed to negotiate what became NAFTA. Each submitted the agreement for ratification in their respective capitals in December 1992, but NAFTA faced significant opposition in both the United States and Canada. All three countries ratified NAFTA in 1993 after the addition of two side agreements, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC) and the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC).

Politically speaking, NAFTA passed in the Clinton administration because he was able to get enough Democrats on board. To this day, free trade doesn't seem to be strongly supported on the left, in part because it's not strongly supported by unions; it's mostly strongly supported by economists, think tanks, and publications that might be characterized more as centrist (the Council on Foreign Relations), center-right (The Economist) or libertarian. I'm not entirely sure why American conservatives in particular moved so strongly against it in the last two decades.

> I'm not entirely sure why American conservatives in particular moved so strongly against it in the last two decades.

There are a couple of factions that makes up modern American conservationism. I think it was mainly big business/ideological libertarians that were strongly for free trade, but I think they were far from the majority, numbers-wise

That flies in the face of the actual policy that was put in place in the Reagan and Bush regimes, and what was advanced or defended by the Republican dominated congresses that existed throughout the 90s.

The 80s and 90s were the era of the FTA and NAFTA, and the rise of the fortunes of the IMF and the WTO. And apart from Clinton in the late 90s this was an era of (for the time) pretty strongly right wing American politics.

In case anyone sees this, thank you for the comments despite my comment being down-voted, I appreciate the insite!

It was neither the "left" (get real) nor the "right" who were pushing for globalization, but multinational corporations. They happen to be on the political right because their goal was to reduce workers' wages and union power, but in fact they have controlled both wings of American politics, the Democrats (fiscally right-wing and socially liberal) and the Republicans (fiscally Right-Wing+ and socially conservative) for a very long time.

: liberal is not considered "Left" outside of the United States

> liberal is not considered "Left" outside of the United States

I see this repeated as a talking point by multiple individuals. I don’t really get what the point of the comment is or what I’m supposed to learn from it or do about it. It feels pretty close to a Scotsman but to what end?

Because it would help if we were closer to talking about the same thing when talking about a subject.

And because Americans are being lied to by their own politicans, and part of that lie is that they have a left wing opposition. They don't, really, apart from the Sanders wing of the Democrats. That Fox News or whatever in the US can with a straight face call Biden "left wing" isn't just a political vocabulary corruption, or a relative shift of frames of reference -- it is an ideological lie, and the purpose of it is to advance an agenda.

And because it would help if Americans looked outside of their own borders at the rest of the world, and gained frame of reference from that.

> Because it would help if we were closer to talking about the same thing when talking about a subject

I'll just quibble with this and say that if we're talking about US politics then we are talking about the same thing when we speak of the "left" in the US, because that's what it is regardless of the state of the rest of the world.

I also am not sure there is much value in arguing about how much more "left" some countries are. The fundamentals aren't really different until you talk about communists (and if that's what you're talking about, I abhor communism and don't want that in my country). If you're talking about universal healthcare for example, you're not really talking about something radically different between "more left countries" like the colloquial Sweden, it's just a matter of degree of difference.

Ok if we're using "universal healthcare" as a minimum definition of "left wing" (for what it's worth I wouldn't accept that, since even Bismarck's right wing authoritarian Prussia had a universal system) that just supports my argument. Universal healthcare is off the table by both parties in the coming federal election. Biden is against it, so is he left wing? (No, sorry, the "public option" tack onto Obamacare doesn't count)

The reason this matters is because as long as Americans accept this false polarity they are missing choice. Not just because they're a two party system, but because their two parties are defined along an ideological axis that misses entire policy choices. And Americans have been mistakenly educated to believe that "socialism" = "government involvement", and that it is an extreme 'left' pole of the political spectrum, and as such they are increasingly ending up with dysfunctional state systems that do not serve the populace.

That and being able to speak to the rest of the world about politics is why clarity of terms here is, I think, important

> Ok if we're using "universal healthcare" as a minimum definition of "left wing" (for what it's worth I wouldn't accept that, since even Bismarck's right wing authoritarian Prussia has a universal system)

I think universal healthcare is a suitable minimum definition of left wing despite that, since a minimum definition is “without this element, a thing cannot be left wing” not “with this element, a thing must be left wing”.

> Universal healthcare is off the table by both parties in the coming federal election.

No, it's not, whether you are referring to the Presidential or Congressional elections, both of which are federal elections in and, unlike in most parliamentary systems, are separate-though-concurrent elections where the candidate platforms even from the same party have no necessary alignment.

> Biden is against it,

No, he's not.

> so is he left wing?

No, he's a center-right neoliberal, just like the rest of the dominant faction of the Democratic Party, and up through at least the early 90s the dominant faction of the Republican Party, too.

A sizable minority of the Democratic Party, though, is (mostly center-)left, though, and they are a not-insignificant factor in Democratic policy stances currently (US major political parties are effectively multifaction coalitions, and just like any coalition the policy preferences of the dominant faction aren't always those of the coalition.)

> (No, sorry, the "public option" tack onto Obamacare doesn't count)

While I don't particularly like it, being part of the more-left-than-Biden part of the Democratic Party, the public option proposed by Biden as recently fleshed out by the Biden-Sanders joint policy group is, in fact, a proposal for universal coverage, not to dissimilar from some other OECD countries, all of which have universal healthcare but far from all of which have public single-payer like Canada's Medicare or public provision like the UK NHS.

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