The Trans-Pacific Partnership: How Tea Party rage could actually help American workers

Free trade deals have a history of benefiting the rich, but the TPP may get squashed by a very unlikely enemy

Tea Party flags.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a mega deal that would lower trade barriers between the U.S. and 11 other nations that border the Pacific Ocean, is getting hit by increasingly ferocious opposition. The surprising part, for this day and age, is that the opposition is bipartisan.

The possible demise of the free trade deal — which President Obama has been trying to shepherd to completion for nearly his entire time in office — is a lesson in the complexities of international negotiations, the drawbacks of abstract economic theories, and the ways the powerful can leverage both to their advantage. But it's also a lesson in how political grievances can interact with those complexities in unexpected, maybe even unintentionally beneficial ways.

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Jeff Spross

Jeff Spross was the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.