The 2016 election cycle has seen few if any instances where the Republican and the Democratic parties agree on anything. In fact, their policy positions and views of America are so different that Time magazine published a piece after the party conventions titled In Two Clashing Conventions, a Clear Choice for the Nation. In the piece author Alex Altman characterized the difference between the two views by noting that “for four days in Cleveland, Republicans painted images of a country beset by crime, besieged by violent visitors and led by political elites who are either too stupid or corrupt to diagnose the problem.” He went on to say that the Democratic party “…responded to Trump’s despair with defiance. ‘We do not scare easily,’ Vice President Joe Biden declared in one of the week’s best speeches. ‘We never bow, we never bend, we never break when confronted with crisis. No, we endure, we overcome and we always, always, always move forward.'” The point is not that that one side is right and the other is wrong; it is the fact that there seems to be a substantial difference in worldviews between the parties.
The partisan divide is so wide that research by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center concluded that “the 2016 campaign is unfolding against a backdrop of intense partisan division and animosity…For the first time in surveys dating to 1992, majorities in both parties express not just unfavorable but very unfavorable views of the other party. And today, sizable shares of both Democrats and Republicans say the other party stirs feelings of not just frustration, but fear and anger.” This is precisely why it’s hard to believe that the parties have found an issue to rally around, but they have. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement, a 12 nation free trade agreement, has provided the very issue that both parties seem to be unified in defeating. Just this last Friday Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., praised Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., for promising to not let the agreement move forward for a vote during the “lame duck” session of Congress following the November election. If McConnell holds to his word, it could mean the death of this agreement. So why has this agreement engendered so much hate and cooperation from the usual rivals? The truth is that I’m not sure since most Americans are not aware of what is in the agreement, to begin with. As I began to have conversations about the agreement with many around me, I found that most believe the agreement is still a secret. I also found that despite the lack of knowledge about the agreement, most seem to believe it’s a bad one. So what is the TPP?
The 12 nations making up the free-trade zone are the United States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, and Japan. The agreement aims to eliminate many of the taxes, fees, embargoes, tariffs, and subsidies that currently exist on American goods entering some of those 12 nations and vice versa. The Obama administration hopes that the agreement will boost trade and create the kind of favorable economic conditions which can jumpstart the struggling American manufacturing sector. There is a sense that much of the negative press that the agreement has received over the last year has been due to the fact that the negotiations were conducted in complete secrecy. But, as President Obama promised a year ago, the full text of the agreement and the government’s assessment of its benefits can now be read in its entirety. To do so one just has to visit any of the following websites.
TPP Issue-by-Issue Information Center
USITC Releases Report Concerning the Likely Impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement
It is important to understand what the agreement is, who it impacts, and how before we begin discussing whether or not it is a positive or negative agreement.
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Isn’t what you are talking about, in your title, the common theme of hating something that is common to left and right really a populist movement. Bernie Sanders was/is against the TPP as is the Donald. Both of these movements can be called a populist movement. One thing that I find interesting is that the supporters of Trump may not be those affected by globalization. I will give a link to my personal blog to not completely rehash this (see: http://jonathanleegibson.com/2016/08/29/new-study-raises-questions-about-the-real-trump-supporters/). If the supporters of Trump of not affected directly by displacement from globalization then what is driving them to want to build a wall and demonize entire groups of people as the cause of America’s problems? (That was a bit of a rhetorical question.)