michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” This week, does the United States need to confront China?

ross douthat

Can these tariffs change China’s behavior overall?

david leonhardt

Then, are labor unions enjoying a comeback?

michelle goldberg

It’s a response to increasing desperation and disempowerment.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

ross douthat

It’s sort of fallen out of our collective memory in a lot of ways.

david leonhardt

The United States and China are engaged in a trade skirmish, with each country slapping tariffs on the other. The confrontation has the potential to slow the global economy. And it’s already made investors nervous.

news clip The markets are really taking a hammering today.

david leonhardt

But it’s not an accident. The Trump administration has been quite clear about the fact that it wants to take a more hawkish stance toward China than other recent presidents did. So Ross, are you on board with all this? With the brewing Trump trade war?

ross douthat

Well, as always with the Trump White House, it’s a very fraught, high-risk thing to defend anything that they’re doing. Because you shouldn’t assume that there’s any kind of definite coherent plan behind it. But with that caveat, I think there’s a lot of sort of weird coverage of the Trump versus China stuff from people, at least in our line of work, in the Twittersphere and so on where there’s this sense of sort of haha, Trump doesn’t understand how tariffs work. He doesn’t understand that U.S. consumers are going to end up paying more. He doesn’t understand that the brunt of this is going to fall on his own voters who are farmers who are going to turn on him and so on. And I feel like the actual context of what Trump is doing is this broader sense that is, I think, shared by a lot of people in positions of authority, that our entire approach to China over the last 10 or 15, 20 years where we have basically kind of bent over backwards in order to try and integrate them into the global trading system, I think there is a broad sense and an accurate sense that this has failed at at least some of its objectives and that we’ve ended up in a situation where China has basically unfair trade practices. We’ve outsourced a chunk of our own industrial base to them. They’re stealing intellectual property constantly. And in that context, the fact that the tariffs are likely to cause some pain to some U.S. consumers and some U.S. farmers and so on isn’t really relevant to the macro question, which is basically can these tariffs change China’s behavior overall? And I’m not sure what the answer is. But I think it’s pretty reasonable to have a policy designed to basically say, let’s see if we can bear some pain in order to change their behavior.

michelle goldberg

I’m not going to argue with you about any of that. And I don’t think most Democrats or most liberals would. It is also true that Trump does not understand how tariffs work and has kind of engaged in this confrontation with China in this spastic, haphazard, and completely counterproductive way. There are a lot of countries that are concerned about the way China is acting. And you could potentially have a broad coalition against these practices if you weren’t also engaging in dumb trade wars with a bunch of your allies and also doing a bunch of other destructive things on the world stage. But we’ve basically reached a point where China is perceived by a lot of the world as the kind of rational actor who’s going to preserve multilateral institutions. And we’re basically this troll kingdom throwing our weight around in ways that make no sort of coherent sense.

ross douthat

I mean, I think there’s two questions here. One is has Trump’s general unilateralism and his willingness to pick fights with allies and so on weakened our position vis-à-vis China. And I think that the answer is yes. And you could say that really he should have pursued a version of TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was supposed to be a multilateral way to contain China. I think that’s still a different question from the question of whether tariffs make sense as sort of a strategic weapon against China. But I’m just seeing a lot of coverage of this that will say things like, oh, well, only U.S. consumers pay the tariffs. And Trump doesn’t understand that, and so on. And he may not understand it or he may just not want admit it, as politicians don’t want to do, admit the obvious truth which is basically that you are accepting that U.S. consumers pay a little more because the theory is that we can bear that cost more than China can bear the cost of losing or reducing its export market to the U.S. And that’s really the only way you ultimately get leverage over them. I mean, I think if you look at like the list of demands that the Trump White House has put out to China in terms of intellectual property, in terms of how many U.S. imports they’re supposed to take, and so on, they’re obviously aggressive and extreme and sort of unlikely to be met. But they’re the kind of goals that the U.S. should be pursuing, I think, after the broad failure of this let’s- integrate-China-and-let-them-develop-and-assume-they’ll-liberalize approach.

michelle goldberg

If you want to have a strategy of saying that the United States is prepared to bear some sort of pain across the board to get to this stronger negotiating position, then first of all you have to sort of get buy-in from at least some fraction of the populace. And to do that, you need to sort of explain that that’s what the strategy is, which only half of the members of the Trump administration are doing. And then you also need a strategy to mitigate it beyond just tweets about a kind of planned agricultural economy and occasional grants to farmers.

david leonhardt

Michelle, I agree that the better way to do it would be to explain to people that we have a larger interest and that even if there is some short term pain, our larger interest is in confronting China. I do think it’s plausible that the effect of the tariffs will be small enough that people won’t feel it. And so the fact that Trump is bumbling about and saying stuff that’s just patently untrue about the tariffs won’t end up mattering that much. But I guess I come back to this point, Michelle, that you’ve already made which is taking on China is a really big deal. And the only way to do it is by trying to line up allies. And Trump’s not doing any of that. And so to me the bigger issue isn’t the silly stuff he’s saying about tariffs. It’s the fact that he has alienated other parts of Asia by backing out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as you said Ross. And he’s alienated Europe by starting trade wars with Europe and cozying up to Putin and doing all these things. And so while even if his diagnosis about the idea that the U.S. needs to be more hawkish on China than George H. W. Bush or Bill Clinton or George W. Bush or Barack Obama, even if that idea is right, I think the odds of him being successful in this are pretty small because of the incompetent way that he’s going about it.

michelle goldberg

I also think that if you’re going to see this as the sort of like big global struggle, maybe not quite akin to the Cold War but in that vein, then it’s insane to see the United States completely squander all of its soft power. China is out there with the Belt and Road Initiative, making all of these investments into developing countries which are then going to end up relying on Chinese technology for the internet. China’s sort of acting like a global power at a time when the United States is retreating from the world stage and also sort of retreating from making a values-based case for an alternative to illiberalism. The United States and the past could have framed this as a new battle between authoritarianism and democracy instead of a battle between well-managed authoritarianism and kind of chaotic authoritarianism, which is what we have right now.

ross douthat

Again, I think that Trump’s broad diplomatic strategy around China hasn’t been incredibly well thought out. At the same time, I think you can overestimate how much this sort of soft power approach that people are imagining is the absolute key to unlocking the China issue. A lot of European countries, Germany and others, don’t clearly have interests aligned exactly with us on trade, and they would be not necessarily easy to bring along. A lot of the countries in East Asia are likely to benefit in certain ways from what Trump is doing. For instance, if you have tariffs that reduce the opportunities to build factories in China and export to the U.S., then countries like Vietnam and other countries in Southeast Asia will benefit. And the U.S. just has a lot of leverage in its conflict with China in the sense that we’re still a more developed economy. I feel like there’s sort of an overestimation of China’s strength vis-à-vis us that comes into a lot of these debates where there’s a sense of like, well, you know, China has grown so much and they’ve become so much more powerful. So again, it seems to me, I think you can obviously make a case that the Trump administration could have a better strategy here. But the specific question before us right now is, does the U.S. have leverage with our own economy running hot, with inflation low, to absorb a little bit of pain to try and change China’s behavior? And I still think the answer might be yes.

david leonhardt

Yeah. The answer to that could be yes. And it could still be the case that this won’t end up succeeding for the reasons that we’re spelling out. But maybe it does.

michelle goldberg

Right. Not only not end up succeeding but end up in the long term making China’s rise even more inevitable. Like making China even more of a global power as we sort of collapse into inward looking decay. I mean, one of the things that we would actually do if we were serious about maintaining our advantage over China is match their huge investments in things like research and development, match they’re huge investments in education, particularly post-secondary education, stop saddling our graduates with life-derailing debts, make it possible for brilliant international students to come here and do their graduate work and start companies. I mean, we’re doing everything we can to kind of hasten our decline as a global power because Trump is running the United States the way he ran his casinos.

ross douthat

I guess I’m not completely sure that our policy vis-à-vis China isn’t actually more important than some of the policy areas you’ve listed. And the fact is that we can all sit and say, oh, well, of course we need to pivot towards China but we need a more coherent and intelligent strategy to do it. But previous administrations — Obama did a little bit at the very end, but did not successfully make this pivot. I mean, I think it’ll be interesting to see what the Democrats say about this in the election. Because if you look at polling numbers right now, China — within the range of foreign policy issues — China gets relatively high priority from voters. Trump’s numbers on trade are better than his numbers in other areas. And I think it would be the most plausible thing for the Democrats to do is basically do a version of what you, David, and you, Michelle, are suggesting and basically say, Trump has some of the right approach. But he’s botching it in these different ways. Right now I’m not sure that Democrats have a China message coherently at all. And Joe Biden, who, you know, to Michelle’s great dismay, is suddenly the democratic front runner —

michelle goldberg

Right. Can I just say people don’t seem to understand that I am saying that to my dismay, but go on.

ross douthat

No. I understand. We understand. But Biden when he talks about China clearly has a very late 1990s mentality still, which may or may not have something to do with the investments that his son has going on in China. But where he’ll say, oh, give me a break. China’s not really our competitor. We can outcompete them and so on. And I think the Democrats need a message that’s more Leohardtian or Goldbergian than what Biden is offering in response to Trump.

david leonhardt

I actually think that’s one of the best arguments against Biden, which is Democrats: really just should not be rerunning the Obama years. I think Obama was a very successful president. But one, times change. And two, he didn’t succeed everywhere. And I think China strikes me as potentially a big example and a test of the Democratic candidates of can they fashion a message that’s not just let’s rerun what we’ve tried before. Because it really has failed. Ross, I still think that because in most areas Trump is so incompetent and/or nefarious, that in one area where he actually is slightly onto something, that you may be grading him too much on a curve. So I’m skeptical that this China policy is going to work. But I do hope he sort of reset the debate for future Democrats and Republicans. And he’s made them realize that a more hawkish policy toward China is not only O.K., but necessary. And there are ways to do it more effectively than he’s doing.

ross douthat

Yeah. The last thing I’d say is just I’m not at all convinced that Trump has the right strategy here. I’m just convinced that this sort of weird mix that I see in the press of, on the one hand, haha, tariffs are just stupid and two, China’s too powerful for any of this to work, that just seems totally wrong to me. And to the extent that that reflects some sort of elite mood, I think it’s way off.

michelle goldberg

I just want to say I feel like we can’t kind of have a talk about America’s foreign policy towards China without noting the fact that China is holding a million Uighurs in concentration camps. And again, I think a rational American foreign policy, not just for kind of like woo-woo human rights reasons, but also for reasons of pragmatic national security and kind of prestige of the liberal order and also just decency, would make that part of the debate and sort of would make any kind of a deal conditional on some sort of action for those people. But again, that’s the kind of leverage that we’ve just completely thrown away.

david leonhardt

That’s a really important point. And in fact, let’s leave this discussion there. And we will take a quick break and come back for our second segment. Is the American labor movement enjoying a resurgence? It sure seems that way sometimes. Last week, drivers for Uber and Lyft staged a one day strike.

news clip The protest is over wages and working conditions. This, as Uber prepares for an I.P.O. on Friday.

david leonhardt

Last year teachers in West Virginia, Arizona, and elsewhere staged their own successful strikes. Workers at digital companies like Vox Media and Gimlet and even meme makers on Instagram are organizing. So what’s going on here, Michelle?

michelle goldberg

A lot of this, I think, just goes back to the increasing precariousness of American life for a whole host of both blue collar but also white collar professional people. Teachers live in poverty. Or they work second jobs. They spend huge amounts of money on supplies. I mean, it’s obscene, both what we expect of a lot of these teachers and what we give them in exchange. And so you’ve seen this kind of huge decline in funding for teachers. At the same time, we treat schools and education policy as sort of the only vector by which we’re willing to address inequality. So one reason is just eventually something has to give. And they’ve also shown that they can work. I mean teachers have wrung pretty substantial concessions out of hostile, right-wing governments. And so success breeds success. And you see this, I think, across a whole host of other industries too. And I guess the question is whether these kind of labor actions can coalesce into a more formal labor movement which you really need to be able to make overarching political change. Not just to win time concessions, but to really change the power dynamic of workers versus capital or workers versus rich taxpayers or however you sort of see the conflict.

david leonhardt

I get why a lot of people are skeptical of unions. I mean, I used to be in the union at the New York Times. And it drove me nuts at times. One of the people who worked for the union, I’m not making this up, had a retirement countdown clock on her desk that faced outward. So when you went to go talk to the union about a problem you had, you had this immediate sense that the person who is trying to help you didn’t really want to be there. And I understand why a lot of people feel like unions protect people who aren’t particularly good at their job. And I know that some unions have a history of corruption. And so I get all that. The problem is, I don’t see any alternative. No alternative whatsoever to helping middle class and working class and low income workers earn good wages other than labor unions. They’ve been hugely effective at doing so over the last century. And the fact they’ve gotten so weak really seems to be a driving force for the rise of inequality and the stagnation of living standards for most people. And so while I think unions need to reform and do some things differently, I really don’t see a future of broad based prosperity without a resurgent union movement. And I guess Ross, I’m interested, given your own conservatism but also your populism, how you think about this.

ross douthat

I mean, I think that there’s a certain amount, especially among a kind of younger social conservative of what you might call strange new respect for unions. If you read books that have come out in the last couple of years like Oren Cass’ “The Once and Future Worker” or Tim Carney’s book “Alienated America,” I think there’s a sense on the right of not just sort of the economic effects of unions, but also their possible role as vehicles for social capital and sort of community solidarity and support for families and so on. So I think there’s an openness on the right to thinking about unions as something other than just corruption-ridden, Jimmy Hoffa meets teachers who can’t be fired institutions. I have a lot of uncertainty though about how they might actually return as a major force in American life. I think I have sort of— I think it’s compatible with what Michelle said. But it’s a slightly different take, which is that part of the resurgence of unions right now isn’t so much reflecting desperation as the return of prosperity, basically. That as the economy has recovered and the strain on state budgets has been reduced and worker bargaining power has increased because more workers are getting hired, there’s room for a kind of mini resurgence of unions. But it’s built on the economic wave rising rather than just being a response to collapse. And that means it’s probably vulnerable, especially in the public sector when there’s another recession and state budgets get cut again. And a lot of, I think, public sector unions in blue states are going to have new waves of problems as existing pension liabilities come due over the next 30 or 40 years. So this is not my area of expertise. When I try and read in it both on the right and on the left, there’s a certain amount of talk about this kind of more European model where you establish unions that aren’t linked to particular companies and to particular sort of workplace bargaining situations, but represent workers across an industry. Oren Cass, who I mentioned earlier, this right-of-center writer, has praised parts of this European model. And there are people on the left who’ve praised it as well. So there might be something there. You sort of see that with the Uber and Lyft combination, where you have workers for what are notionally two separate companies sort of working together. But I feel like there has to be some sort of reinvention of the union model beyond the existing setup. Because the decline has just been too steep to just blame it all on Republicans and right to work laws and so on. There has to be some sort of reinvention. But I’m not sure what it should be.

david leonhardt

Michelle, do you think a reinvention can happen? I assume you think for unions to come back they can’t just try to repeat the past. They’ve got to do some things differently.

michelle goldberg

Well, I wouldn’t underestimate the role of right to work laws and the role of Republican policies in decimating the conditions for unions and the conditions for collective bargaining. But it’s certainly true that you kind of need unions that are responsive to the way people actually work. So that you need, how do you form a union for the sort of quote, unquote gig economy which is what you have with Uber and Lyft. So I think there needs to be a reimagining of the union movement, but also just of the labor movement more generally. There’s other ways to change policy to give working people more power over their lives and more sort of material security.

david leonhardt

One thing that I would like to see is the so-called resistance, which I think has been very effective and impressive overall, think a little bit more about the importance of getting workers bargaining power, meaning that part of the resistance should essentially be working with the labor movement or trying to reimagine the labor movement. And the episode that really sharpened my thinking on this was the shutdown. We spent a lot of time talking about it on the show, where you had this horrific situation in which federal workers were expected to go to work and not be paid. And in a country with a strong labor movement, that just never would have happened. And the fact that the Trump resistance could not get workers — federal workers, airport workers, and others — to stay home because the Trump resistance really isn’t at all connected particularly strongly to the labor movement, to me was a sign of the weakness of the resistance. And then at the end, you had like a couple dozen, if that, air traffic controllers stay home. It shut down LaGuardia. And suddenly, the shutdown was over. Because society wasn’t willing to bear that inconvenience. And to me, it was just a huge reminder of the enormous power that people can have when they band together and basically go out on strike.

michelle goldberg

One exception to that is Sara Nelson, the president of the Flight Attendants Union, who was very vocal during the shutdown and sort of bridged the labor movement and the anti-Trump resistance. And then, I also want to say that the links between the resistance and the labor movement, at least in places where I’ve reported, have gone the other way. So when I talked to a lot of the teachers who were striking in Arizona, they first got mobilized at the Women’s March or through other sorts of anti-Trump groups. And then they started looking, as a lot of people did at that time, towards local politics. And that’s where some of those connections — I mean, they’re not entirely responsible for those wildcat teacher strikes. But I spoke to a lot of people who talked about this kind of broader sense of women — because teachers are mostly women — sort of getting more active and becoming more assertive and becoming more sort of aware of what’s gone wrong in their own local political situations.

david leonhardt

Yeah. And I think that’s great. I guess I’m saying we just need to see more of it, which is we need to see more of the flowering of political activism that has happened in response to Trump. More of that needs to get connected to what are, I think, fundamental unfairnesses in the workplace that are making people’s lives really difficult.

ross douthat

I just want to— I think I should here express a right wing opinion and say that I don’t think it would be good if the federal government’s workforce were unionized and that there are reasons why Franklin Roosevelt, among other very otherwise pro-union politicians, opposed unionization of the federal workforce. And I think in general, it would be much better for the left to focus on a recovery of private sector unionization than trying to bring unionization to the federal government.

david leonhardt

Yeah. And I guess my point was not so much that federal workers need to be organized. I’m not sure I agree with you on that, Ross. But I’m also not sure I disagree with you. It’s more that if we had a strong labor movement, you would have had all kinds of workers, potentially including flight attendants and pilots, saying hey, you know what, if the air traffic controllers aren’t getting paid, we’re not going to work. And the shutdown would have ended quite quickly. I didn’t mean it narrowly as a point about federal workers, but more broadly.

ross douthat

I mean, I also, just to bring this back to our earlier segment, I mean a lot of this is bound up in this question of trade policy over the last 30 or 40 years. And that doesn’t mean that there’s any kind of definite answer. But one of the big challenges for unions has been that the whole idea of the union is that it forces employers to pay a premium slightly above what a sort of market wage would be. And that premium then can make American companies uncompetitive in a landscape of globalization, outsourcing, and so on. And so if we’re sort of doing a kind of revisionist history of the choices we’ve made vis-à-vis China over the last 20 or 25 years, then that is connected to the question of can you make firms that pay slightly above market wages viable in a global economy.

michelle goldberg

But that’s true, I mean, isn’t that true only when you’re talking about manufacturing companies? I mean, the unions that we’ve been discussing— teacher unions, public sector unions, the attempts at some kind of labor action by Uber and Lyft drivers — these are all basically service jobs that are not really affected by global trade that much one way or the other.

ross douthat

Yes. That’s true. But what has driven the collapse of unionization has been its collapse in the manufacturing sector. And maybe we just take that as a given and sort of assume that we have a service economy and that we’re just interested in raising wages in the service sector. But I think the challenge that Trump has offered kind of reasonably is whether that decision is the right decision or whether we should have a kind of industrial policy again, in which the idea of making American manufacturing viable and well paying is plausible again.

david leonhardt

I do think the transition to a more service oriented economy in some ways makes the idea that unions could come back more plausible. Because Michelle, as you’re saying, they aren’t these tradable goods often across borders. But I want to end with a little quiz. Do either of you know who said this? There is no good society without a good union.

michelle goldberg

Ronald Reagan?

david leonhardt

Ross, any guess?

ross douthat

I’ll let Michelle’s guess stand.

david leonhardt

Pope Francis.

michelle goldberg

Well, that makes sense. Yeah, that’s not surprising.

ross douthat

That’s totally, totally predictable. Popes are always suckers for unions.

david leonhardt

And on that note, we will end our second segment and come right back with a recommendation. Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation when we give you a suggestion meant to take your mind off of politics. This week is my turn. And here’s what I’ve got, a book “Say Nothing” by Patrick Radden Keefe. I was talking to a close friend a couple weeks ago. And he said to me that he was looking forward to getting home and getting into bed each night because he liked the book that he was reading so much. So of course, I had to pick it up. And it is a history of the Troubles, of the horrific clashes in Northern Ireland basically between Irish Catholics and Protestants that took up much of the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. And it’s just a wonderful book. It’s got excellent reporting. The writing is really nice. There are fascinating, complicated characters. And I think there are a lot of non-Brits out there, non-Irish out there like me, who had a vague sense of the Troubles but actually knew relatively little about it. And while this book is sort of packaged as a murder mystery, it’s really a history of the Troubles. And it’s really one of the most enjoyable books, even though it’s about some dark stuff, that I’ve read in quite some time. I ripped through it in less than a week. Have either of you read it?

michelle goldberg

No. I mean, I’ve heard such amazing things about it. I decided that I finally have to read Taylor Branch’s Martin Luther King trilogy, which I think altogether is maybe something short of 3,000 pages. And so I have a whole bunch of books that I’m dying to read kind of piling up. But that’s definitely one of them.

ross douthat

Yeah. I haven’t read it either. But it’s an interesting coincidence. I just wrote a column about another book about Ireland, this little memoir by Michael Brendan Dougherty called “My Father Left Me Ireland.” He’s a journalist for National Review who was the son of an Irish father and an Irish-American single mother. And his father moved back to Ireland before he was born. And he basically grew up without a father, but with this strong, intense desire for a connection to Ireland. And one of the striking things about the book, which I only sort of half remembered, was how culturally significant in America the Troubles were in parts of America that had this strong Irish diaspora. Like it was a huge story in the ‘70s and ‘80s and into the 1990s. And it shaped Dougherty’s childhood in this book he wrote, which I also recommend. But it’s just interesting because it’s sort of I think one reason that the Radden Keefe book sounds so interesting is that it’s sort of fallen out of our collective memory in a lot of ways.

david leonhardt