4 ms·
When were leftists NOT protectionists? Protectionism is anti-liberal and anti-free-market? It was always left-wing.
by lumberjack 7y ago
When were leftists NOT protectionists? Protectionism is anti-liberal and anti-free-market? It was always left-wing.
- riffraff 7y agoactual communism and socialism was internationalist at its core.
- lumberjack 7y agoInternationalist yes, but not pro-free-trade. And in practice it was always almost always the opposite of that. In Europe all the hard-left parties were anti-EU precisely because they were opposed to free trade and wanted to protect the local markets.
- labster 7y agoCurrently in the United States the liberal party is the party of free trade while the right-wing president calls himself the Tarriff Man.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lumberjack 7y ago1. The Democrats are not leftists. Liberals are not leftists. 2. Ideologically speaking both US Republicans and US Democrats are Liberals and pro-free trade, Trump is an exception.
- learc83 7y agoLanguage changes, and in American English at least, the definition of liberal has changed. If you use the word liberal to describe what we might refer to as "classical liberal", you will needlessly confuse people.
- wallace_f 7y agoKind of an outlier, though, because the Republicans typically cheer free trade (but then put tarrifs on shoes, cheese, tires, etc, etc, and of course subsidize big agribusineess, Wall St., etc).
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> the Republicans typically cheer free trade These affinities have shifted many times in American political history. For example, Lincoln was a Republican.
- village-idiot 7y agoThere are plenty of examples of leftists not being protectionist. The Girondins of revolutionary France were very pro free market, something that lost them a lot of support among the starving sans culottes. The more radical Mountain factions appear to have mostly supported protectionist measures, namely maximum prices, largely out of the need to stop the mobs of Paris from literally storming the legislative halls. The moment the parisians believed that the maximum didn’t work, they were dropped.