Now that the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations have concluded, a lot of people across the political spectrum are going to have insightful and intelligent things to say about the agreement. Their analyses may argue for opposing positions, but the public will be better off and more informed for having listened to any of them. On the other hand, some opponents of the deal will rely on baseless fearmongering.
Fear of the unknown is a natural (and largely beneficial) human extinct. When people feel like they don’t understand how something works, they’re more likely to imagine that it does something horrible. This is why opponents of trade liberalization constantly exaggerate the secrecy of negotiations why they focus their rhetoric on things like transnational corporate agendas, loss of national sovereignty, or lower food safety—things that most people don’t understand very well but are afraid of.
Most often, fantastic predictions about the consequences of free trade arguments are put forward by the Left. They have claimed that the TPP will kill dolphins, allow corporations to bypass government regulations, cause global warming, or force us all to eat GMOs. None of this is true, but anti-trade groups are making fairly persuasive arguments based on inaccurate and exaggerated claims.
Anti-trade groups on the political right use similar methods. The easiest target for these groups has been apprehension among conservative voters over the intentions of President Obama, focusing on things like immigration and gun control. Conservative protectionists adopted the term “Obamatrade” to refer—interchangeably, in order to profit from confusion—to the TPP, trade promotion authority, and even the WTO. During the debate earlier this year over trade promotion authority, a number of politicians fell for the simplistic but inaccurate argument that TPA would enable Obama to secretly liberalize America’s immigration laws.