The policy of protectionism is part of a broader economic policy agenda. Today’s Republicans should follow those Presidents’ guidance and implement a true “old right” limited-government conservative agenda.
Former Vice President Mike Pence argues in The Wall Street Journal that President Donald Trump needs to return to “conservative principles.” The former Vice President is especially critical of President Trump’s tariff and foreign policies. “Economic warning signs are flashing” he notes, also worrying about the abandonment of Ukraine and the administration’s stance on Iran, which is too gentle by Pence’s reckoning. Vice President Pence is not the only conservative critical of President Trump’s trade policy. The shaky rollout of the tariff policy, negative market reaction, and consistently one-sided “reporting” and “analysis” in the media, have led many in the conservative movement to strike against the President’s protectionism.
Historical perspective is needed, however, because the debate is less a battle of conservative versus non-conservative policies than a question of which era of conservatism applies. Pence’s call for a “return to conservative principles that guided” the first Trump administration, in which he participated, is not an endorsement of America First policies, but a longing for neoconservatism’s return.
He argues that “if we want to see this nation become truly great again, we can’t exchange time-tested conservative principles for populist platitudes,” by which he means, in part, to endorse free markets and free trade. Pence moderates, of course, attempting to cordon off “adversaries such as China,” with trade agreements. Yet, readers have reason to doubt the strength of both his conviction and the effectiveness of the balance he promises.
In a letter to the editor in The Wall Street Journal, Tim Chapman, the president of Pence’s public policy organization, Advancing American Freedom, describes President Trump’s tariff policy as “Bernie Sanders-style economic populism.” He goes so far as to refer to protectionists as “quack doctors.” This is not the language of people who understand the need for nuance and balance in trade policy. It is also not the language of people who understand the heritage of America’s two fundamental ideological strains. Chapmen juxtaposes the “traditional conservative formula” of tax cuts and deregulation with the “permanent protectionism to eliminate the trade deficit” of “old-school progressives,” but his rewritten history is jumbled.
Conservative intellectual Patrick J. Buchanan once stated there are “too many conservatives who are liberals traveling under a false passport.” Their true allegiances can be seen in their embrace of “heroes” such as Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and John F. Kennedy. Classical liberals (libertarians), who have become part of the Republican coalition, embraced free trade, but so did progressives like William Jennings Bryan and President Woodrow Wilson. “The old political formulas do not fit the present problems,” Wilson wrote. “They read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age.” One of the policies he meant was protectionism.
President Wilson — whom former Republican Congressman Christopher Cox has described as a “tariff slayer” — lowered tariffs after Congress passed the Underwood Tariff Act in 1913. Previously the government’s primary source of revenue, tariffs were replaced by the income tax, officially enacted with the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Cox reports that advocates promised “lower consumer prices with a modest income tax to make up the revenue loss.” This “winning recipe,” as Cox describes it, lowered tariffs while leaving most Americans exempt from the income tax, but the recipe was gradually adulterated. Along with the size of government, the income tax continued to expand.
In our time, many Republicans have fully embraced free trade as an ultimate source for the common good, but they have forgotten protectionism was actually a conservative policy. Tariff-supporter Alexander Hamilton was once admired by conservatives such as Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge and Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. Today, many conservatives and Republicans view him as the grandfather of “big government.”
Republican administrations, from President Abraham Lincoln’s through President Herbert Hoover’s, embraced the policy of protectionism as a fundamental economic policy. Tariffs featured prominently in Republican Party platforms. Protecting American sovereignty, independence, and high wages for workers were all part of economic nationalism, which conservatives saw as benefiting the entire economy.
In the election of 1920, the American people resoundingly repudiated both Wilsonian progressivism and internationalism by electing Ohio’s Warren G. Harding in a landslide. Harding defended the tariff and the policy of protection. “I believe in the protective tariff policy and know we will be calling for its saving Americanism again,” he stated. The 1920 Republican platform endorsed higher tariffs for the “preservation of the home market for American labor, agriculture, and industry.”
When he entered the White House, Harding confronted an economic crisis: the depression of 1920–21. Only a month after taking office, Harding addressed a joint session of Congress, calling for reductions in taxes and spending — and for a return to protectionism. “I believe in the protection of American industry, and it is our purpose to prosper America first,” he said.
The President argued the tariff would protect American agriculture and industries, as well as the country’s “standards of wage and living.” Revenue from the tariff would pay a “fair share of our cost of government.” Congress answered Harding’s call with the Emergency Tariff Act of 1921 and then, the next year, the Fordney-McCumber Tariff. The protective tariff was part of a grand economic strategy utilized by both Harding and Coolidge that also included limiting spending, tax reduction, and paying down the national debt.
Just as he had, Harding’s successor, Coolidge, won the 1924 campaign in a landslide, and in his inaugural address, he attributed America’s economic prosperity in part to protectionism. Echoing President William McKinley, Coolidge had campaigned on the image of a “full dinner pail,” which he explained for the inaugural: “Under the helpful influences of restrictive immigration and a protective tariff, employment is plentiful, the rate of pay is high, and wage earners are in a state of contentment seldom before seen.” Coolidge’s continuation of protectionist policies is often forgotten.
In his time, Harding had approved the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of 1922, “doubling tariff rates to 38 percent,” as Buchanan writes. “But he also slashed Woodrow Wilson’s income tax rates by two-thirds, back to 25 percent.” Both Coolidge and even Mellon went on to defend protectionism during the presidential campaign of 1932, during which the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was an issue. Coolidge staunchly defended tariffs in September 1932, writing: “Our only defense against the cheap production, low wages, and low standard of living which exist abroad, and our only method of maintaining our own standards, is through a protective tariff. We regard protection as a national policy, to be applied wherever it is required.”
This conservatism of the 1920s was what President George W. Bush maligned decades later as the “isms” of protectionism, nativism, and isolationism. However, the Harding and Coolidge policies of tariffs and limited immigration resulted not only in economic expansion, but also in genuinely limited government.
Buchanan provides a snapshot of the results: “Unemployment, 12 percent when Harding took office, was 3 percent when Calvin Coolidge left. Manufacturing output rose 64 percent in the Roaring Twenties. Between 1923 and 1927, U.S. growth was 7 percent a year. At decade’s end, America produced 42 percent of the world’s goods.”
Compare the Harding-Coolidge record with that of America’s more-recent collection of free trade agreements. The nation has been running massive trade deficits for decades, according to the Congressional testimony of United States Trade Representative Ambassador Jamieson Greer, and the most recent deficit of $1.2 trillion set a record. The trade deficit, along with the national debt, continues to escalate. Since 1994, the United States “has lost five million manufacturing jobs and 90,000 factories.”
Internationally, “the United States’ share of world manufacturing output declined from 28 percent in 2001 to 17 percent last year,” and “in the fourth quarter of 2024, U.S. manufacturing as a share of gross domestic product was the lowest it had been in 20 years.” The United States has become dangerously dependent upon foreign nations and supply chains. This dependency is not just to feed consumers’ addiction to cheap goods or textiles, but also to supply national necessities such as pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and other high-technology products.
From sea to shining sea, the middle class and many communities have been decimated. Buchanan’s question ought to ring loudly through the internecine wrangling of the American Right: If we are not going to “conserve communities, neighborhoods, towns, and families, what are we going to conserve?”
Progressives such as Wilson insisted reducing tariffs would benefit consumers, and many Republicans and libertarians make this point today. Certainly, cheap goods, with inflation at their heels, can play a role in the cycle of national debt, consumption, and escalating taxation to generate statistics of growth, but is that what conservatives ought to protect? Is it even progress?
What would President George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, who both warned about foreign dependency, think about our current condition? They might point out that protectionism does not mean a rejection of trade, but a realistic approach emphasizing the American economy first.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent argues that President Trump’s economic strategy is not based only on tariffs to rebalance trade, but also on tax cuts and deregulation. This was the approach of Presidents Harding and Coolidge. The policy of protectionism is part of a broader economic policy agenda. Today’s Republicans should follow those Presidents’ guidance and implement a true “old right” limited-government conservative agenda. Republicans should not celebrate Wilson the “tariff slayer,” but Harding, who stated that “we are forever devoted “to safeguard America first, to stabilize America first, to prosper America first, to think of America first, to exalt America first, and to live for and revere America first.” Harding’s winning theme, in 1920, was a “return to normalcy,” a proposition that American conservatives a century later should apply to their own collection of policy positions.
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