Both Trump and Biden imposed high tariffs on imported products made in China and other countries. Those impositions broke with and departed from the previous half century’s policies favoring “free trade” (less or minimal government intervention in international markets). Free trade policies facilitated “globalization,” the euphemism for the post-1970 surge in U.S. corporations’ investing abroad: producing and distributing there, re-locating operations there, and merging with foreign enterprises there.

Presidents before Trump had insisted that free trade plus globalization best served U.S. interests. Both Democratic and Republican administrations had enthusiastically endorsed that insistence. Dutifully performing ideological support duties, they stressed how globalization’s benefits to U.S. corporations would “trickle down” to the rest of us. Globalizing U.S. corporations used portions of their profits to reward both parties with donations and other electoral and lobbying supports.

Our last two Presidents reversed that position. Against free trade they favored multiple government interventions in international trade, especially imposing and raising tariffs. Instead of advocating free trade and globalization, they promoted economic nationalism. Like their predecessors, Trump and Biden depended on financial support from corporate America as well as votes from the employee class. Many U.S. corporations and those they enriched had shifted their profit expectations in response to the competition they faced from new, powerful non-U.S. firms. The latter had emerged during the free-trade/globalization conditions after 1970, above all in China. U.S. firms increasingly welcomed or demanded protection from those competitors. Accordingly, they financed changes in the political winds and shifts in “public opinion” toward economic nationalism.

Trump and Biden thus endorsed pro-tariff policies that protected many corporations’ profits. Those policies also appealed to those for whom economic nationalism offered ideological comforts. For example, many in the United States grasped the relative decline of the United States and its G7 allies in the global economy and the relative rise of China and its BRICS allies. They welcomed an aggressive counteraction in the forms of tariff and trade wars. Both corporations (including mass media) and their subservient politicians worked to build popular and voter support. That was needed to pass the tax, budget, subsidy, tariff, and other laws that would realize the shift to economic nationalism. A key argument held that “tariffs protect jobs.” A political struggle pitted the defenders of “free trade” against those demanding “protection.” Over the last decade, those defenders have been losing.

These days, most candidates and parties perform this particular ideological task for capitalism: persuading Americans that........

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