The 2016 platform does not ultimately repudiate TPP—a bone of contention between the Sanders and Clinton supporters on the drafting committee—however it stipulates that any new trade agreement must meet the “standards” described above, “including the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”
Donald Trump objects not to the substance of such aims but to their sincerity when avowed by Hillary Clinton. Indeed, he predicted in his own convention speech that Bernie Sanders supporters “will join our movement, because we will fix his biggest issue: trade.” Trump went on to declare that he would not let “companies move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequences,” a promise Clinton echoed when she said in her own speech that, “if companies take tax breaks and then ship jobs overseas, we’ll make them pay us back.”
To be sure, there are still important policy differences between the candidates—Trump has proposed a massive tax cut, Clinton a raise in the federal minimum wage to $15—but in respect to their domestic agendas, the center of gravity for both parties is economic populism.
These are very confusing times with respect to the future of American politics and its implications for capitalism. When attempting to make sense of this confusion, I return again to Keynes’s seminal essay, “The End of Laissez-Faire.” Near the end of that essay, he writes of how our moral and technical appraisal of capitalism can sometimes be at odds, making for the bewilderment that both scrambles politics and obscures, even to ourselves, what we hope to accomplish and why. “Confusion of thought and feeling leads to confusion of speech,” he says: