Pat Buchanan: The Great Betrayal

The ongoing globalization of economic life leaves many Americans nervous and suspicious. Pat Buchanan has played to this anxiety in two presidential campaigns and is now preparing to do so a third time. To that end he has written The Great Betrayal, a root-and-branch rejection of free trade in favor of a "new nationalism."

Not surprisingly, scholars at the Center for Trade Policy Studies take issue with much of what Buchanan writes. This web page provides links to excerpts from various Center publications that offer an alternative perspective to Buchanan's protectionist analysis.

For a general overview, read Brink Lindsey's review of The Great Betrayal, which appeared in the July 1998 issue of Reason magazine.

Links to discussion of specific topics:

Buchanan on the history of U.S. protectionism: "Behind a tariff wall built by Washington, Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, and the Republican presidents who followed, the United States had gone from an agrarian coastal republic to become the greatest industrial power the world had ever seen -- in a single century. Such was the success of the policy called protectionism that is so disparaged today."¹

Buchanan on national sovereignty: "Like a shipwrecked, exhausted Gulliver on the beach of Lilliput, America is to be tied down with threads, strand by strand, until it cannot move when it awakens. 'Piece by piece,' our sovereignty is being surrendered."²

Buchanan on the trade deficit and jobs: "In 1996 the U.S. merchandise trade deficit hit an astounding $191 billion. Never before had an advanced industrial nation recorded such a deficit. If, as Presidents Bush and Clinton have contended, $1 billion in exports equals twenty thousand jobs, America loses between 3.5 million and 4 million manufacturing jobs annually."³

Buchanan on the North American Free Trade Agreement: "Two years after NAFTA, the predictions of its opponents had all come true. The U.S. trade surplus with Mexico had vanished; a trade deficit of $15 billion had opened up. . . By 1997, 3,300 maquiladora factories were operating, employing 800,000 Mexican workers in jobs that not long ago would have gone to Americans."⁴

Buchanan on imports: "Americans no longer make their own cameras, shoes, radios, TVs, toys. A fifth of our steel, a third of our autos, half our machine tools, and two-thirds of our textiles and clothes are made abroad."⁵

Notes:

1. The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy, by Patrick J. Buchanan, New York: Little, Brown, page 224.
2. Ibid. page 107.
3. Ibid. page 36.
4. Ibid. page 269.
5. Ibid. page 13.