Tariffs and Tribes

There is a principle in international trade that says a nation is better off not imposing tariffs even if a trading partner does. Yes, retaliation may feel righteous — but consumers benefit so greatly from open trade that the long-term economy is stronger if cooler heads prevail.

In the early days of the second Trump administration, I found myself wondering whether this analogy applied — in the darker realm of race.

We watched a president purge African Americans from positions of visible authority, assemble the whitest cabinet since Eisenhower, and cheer on those who saw progress in diversity as a conspiracy to be reversed. The hostility toward Latinos, Muslims, and anyone who struck him as foreign only confirmed the trend. It was hard not to ask: If this ugliness is rewarded — what becomes of the rest of us?

Born in 1966, I grew up in a country climbing out of the long shadow of slavery and Jim Crow. Even conservatives in my lifetime — Reagan and both Bushes — never waged an open campaign against the legitimacy of our equality. They argued about the means of progress, not the rightness of the cause.

Trump’s approach went well beyond that. So I wondered: Do I now have to compensate?
If two people apply for a job, must I tilt my thumb toward the Black applicant to offset what he may face elsewhere?
Do I worry more about my Black friends than my white friends out in the world, because “MAGA” has made the world selectively more dangerous?

Or do I keep faith with a different kind of strength?

Because here is the overlooked truth: the American immune system is kicking in. Independents are recoiling. Credulous institutions are rethinking their loyalty. The spell of inevitability is breaking — at last. Whatever executive power Trump still wields, it now operates mostly by force, not persuasion. That brief experiment in high-level permission-slip bigotry may have passed its zenith.

Of course I refuse the retaliatory tariff, not out of naiveté, but out of clarity. Even if others indulge in the economics of grievance, we all remain richer loving people the same.

And there is, too, a quieter benefit. When you refuse to return prejudice in kind — when you decline to hate the man who hates — you keep your own heart in repair. You preserve the joy of not becoming what wounds you. There is human profit in that.

Like my old international trade professor, I am convinced now: the theory holds.
Our country is better when we do not mirror the worst of each other.