"It certainly was difficult to sell NAFTA because it's always difficult to sell open markets"
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Summers frames NAFTA not as a contested political choice but as a communications problem, and that move is doing a lot of work. By saying it was "difficult to sell" because it is "always difficult to sell open markets", he treats opposition as a near-natural reflex: the public resists, technocrats persuade, history moves on. The syntax smooths away the messy particulars of NAFTA - wage pressure, job churn, regional decline, labor leverage - and recasts them as noise around a policy whose merits are presumed. "Certainly" adds the patina of realism, as if he is conceding a hard truth, while quietly reaffirming that the hard truth is about marketing, not legitimacy.
The subtext is paternal: ordinary voters are predictably anxious about trade; serious people understand the net gains. It is also a blueprint for elite politics in the 1990s and after. Free trade is presented as a default setting of modernity, and the task of leadership is to manage the narrative long enough to implement it. That helps explain why "open markets" becomes the hero phrase here. It is morally flattering, almost civic-sounding, and strategically abstract. Who wants to be against openness?
Context matters: NAFTA was sold during a period of high faith in globalization and economic efficiency, then retroactively litigated as communities absorbed dislocation without commensurate support. Summers' line captures that era's confident technocracy, and hints at the backlash it helped incubate: when you treat politics as sales, dissent doesn't disappear; it waits for a less polite language to return.
The subtext is paternal: ordinary voters are predictably anxious about trade; serious people understand the net gains. It is also a blueprint for elite politics in the 1990s and after. Free trade is presented as a default setting of modernity, and the task of leadership is to manage the narrative long enough to implement it. That helps explain why "open markets" becomes the hero phrase here. It is morally flattering, almost civic-sounding, and strategically abstract. Who wants to be against openness?
Context matters: NAFTA was sold during a period of high faith in globalization and economic efficiency, then retroactively litigated as communities absorbed dislocation without commensurate support. Summers' line captures that era's confident technocracy, and hints at the backlash it helped incubate: when you treat politics as sales, dissent doesn't disappear; it waits for a less polite language to return.
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| Topic | Business |
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