If and when trade and globalization come up at the Democratic National Convention next week, I can almost guarantee that the take will be negative. It has become part of the party’s core message these days that free trade favors the rich at home and our unfair trading partners abroad. Just yesterday, in a tour of southern Virginia, Democratic hope Barak Obama took an indirect swipe at trade when he told a crowd in Martinsville, “You’re worried about the future. Here people have gone through very tough times. When you’ve got entire industries that have shipped overseas, when you’ve got thousands of jobs being lost.… That’s tough.”

Not all Democrats share the pessimistic view of trade. In the latest edition of the Cato Journal, hot off the presses, I review a new book by pro-trade Democrat Ed Gresser of the Progressive Policy Institute. In my review of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy, I wrote:

Although it is easy to forget today as Democratic candidates rail against NAFTA and globalization, but for decades it was the Democratic Party that championed lower tariffs. Democrats opposed the high tariff wall maintained by Republicans from the Civil War to World War One, arguing that tariffs benefited big business at the expense of poor consumers. Under President Woodrow Wilson, Congress drastically lowered tariffs in 1913 and replaced the revenue with an income tax, only to see Republicans raise tariffs again in the 1920s, culminating in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 and the Great Depression that followed.

The Democrats should think long and hard before they give up that legacy altogether.

You can read the full review here.