Leadership Quote by Byron Dorgan

Dorgan’s line is a politician’s tightrope walk, and it’s effective precisely because you can see the balancing pole. He opens by rejecting the blunt instrument of a “fence,” a word that conjures nativism, isolation, and a kind of scared smallness. That first clause is a preemptive credential: I’m not that guy. But the pivot comes fast, and it’s the pivot that does the real work. “But I do believe” signals permission to worry about globalization without sounding reactionary.

The key word is “fairness,” a moral frame that scrubs away the messy mechanics of trade policy and replaces them with something visceral: being played for a sucker. “Rules of this globalization” turns globalization from an inevitability (markets! technology!) into a governed system that can be renegotiated. He’s not attacking immigrants; he’s attacking the referees. That’s shrewd, because it invites blue-collar anxiety into respectable conversation while keeping an arm’s length from hard-border politics.

Contextually, this is the late-20th/early-21st-century Democratic critique of free trade: pro-integration in theory, skeptical of how the gains are distributed in practice. Dorgan is speaking to workers watching factories move, to communities hollowed out by offshoring, and to voters frustrated that corporations seem to cross borders more freely than labor protections do. The subtext is a demand for enforceable standards - wages, environmental rules, tax discipline - without the cultural baggage of outright protectionism. It’s an argument for guardrails, not walls, and it’s built to sound like common sense rather than ideology.