Too fast, too furious: How the TPP allowed economics to trump politics

The divisive debate over the Trans-Pacific Partnership has made plain that international economics is the most important issue dividing both major political parties today. Republicans and Democrats alike confront all the concerns surrounding crony corporatism at the domestic level; at the global level, the stakes are magnified as the scale and speed of change increases.

So the TPP, which would draw a dozen Pacific Rim nations into an unprecedented economic pact, has drawn the ire of "far" leftists like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and "far" rightists of the Gadsden persuasion.

According to the mainstream economic internationalists of both parties, the TPP's opponents are united by simple fear. They are "protectionists," ignorantly afraid to play full out in a global economy that heaps prosperity on anyone willing and able to do so.

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Without question, some so-called protectionists on the right and the left really do put economic fears first. They insist that globalization, at best, is a dangerously fickle friend; at worst, a machine that reliably produces large numbers of losers right here at home. They warn that the TPP will help consolidate private control over America's economic destiny — a double curse, given how recklessly the world's big banks have hardwired secret speculation into the heart of our financial system.

These claims are not frivolous or far-fetched, but they are subsidiary to a more fundamental objection to the TPP. Critiquing the TPP on economic grounds concedes what should be the central point of contention — that, ultimately, it is economic matters that should, and do, decide political questions.

If economics reigns supreme over politics, more than the prestige of our politicians is endangered. The health of our democracy is too.

Deep down, rebellious members of both parties sense this. They are troubled by the TPP because they recognize that so many of its proponents are allowing the logic of global trade to undermine political authority regardless of ideological team membership.

Indeed, as practiced by much of today's elite, the bedrock principle of international political economy can be distilled into a simple phrase: policy must trump politics.

That's because, when it comes to matters such as massive new trade agreements, political deliberation is not just an obstacle to progress — it's a pollutant or contaminant, an alien substance that inherently spoils the broth.

To begin with, our economic supremacists maintain, the practice of politics is too simplistic. By representing local constituencies with parochial interests, politicians fail to apprehend the importance of the sophisticated economic whole. What's more, however, political practice is too complicated. Politicians interfering with landmark trade agreements add variables that unbalance the carefully calibrated system of "complex interdependence" crafted by expert elite negotiators drawn from the public and private sector.

But worst of all, from the standpoint of the international political economy, elected officials mistakenly believe that the decision-making process of representative political deliberation is still adequate to comprehend the pace of well-ordered economic life.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, political theorists could still argue — as did America's most perceptive founders — that the very slowness of political deliberation was a tremendous virtue. Inflamed public passions and invidious personal schemes alike would be drained of their energy and sapped of their power. Both depended for success on their speed.

Rather than drawing out the best or strongest arguments, as John Stuart Mill would claim, open political deliberation was crucial to freedom because it rebuffed the constant threat of political abuse that increased apace with the speed of political change.

That wisdom, so foundational to the Anglo-American experience of freedom, is foreign to the intellectual pedigree of today's policy elite. International agreements are to be negotiated by experts authorized by their knowledge, and pursued by leaders authorized by their passion. "I would not be doing this trade deal if I did not think it was good for the middle class," as President Obama recently informed Chris Matthews on MSNBC. "And when you hear folks make a lot of suggestions about how bad this trade deal is, when you dig into the facts they are wrong."

Of course, giving politicians an opportunity to dig into the facts invites them to pick and choose among negotiated terms designed to stand or fall together. That's why Obama is adamant that Congress grant him so-called "fast track" authority on TPP — giving the agreement an up-or-down vote, rather than applying the stolid virtue of deliberative oversight piece by piece, provision by provision. That's why pro-TPP senators rushed through a hearing on fast track so swiftly that their less sanguine colleagues were whipsawed. "We got 12 hours notice on a bill we haven't seen," Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio objected. "You can't fast-track fast track."

But the Senate Finance Committee has done exactly that, smoothing the way with a suite of apparent concessions to its unhappy factions. Obama, The New York Times reports, must tell Congress the TPP is finished 90 days before he plans to sign it. "But in a new twist, the full agreement would have to be made public for 60 days before the president gives his final assent and sends it to Congress. Congress could not begin considering it for 30 days after that."

Ostensibly, these measures will give the TPP a full and fair public hearing. In reality, however, they will simply substitute "politicization" in the profane sense for the actual practice of politics. Instead of methodical deliberation, the TPP will be plunged into the opposite — the very accelerant of inflamed public passion and personal ambition the Founders knew that only politics, properly undertaken, could counter. After a compressed blitzkrieg dominated by money, mobilization, and mouthpieces, the TPP's proponents will have dispensed with the inconvenience of symbolic "democracy," and the rubber stamping will, no doubt, commence.

Even the best of treaties should not be closed to amendment. No economic agreement is so important that it must be swallowed whole. And no policy is so perfect that it needs nothing of the virtue of politics.