Is the implication that conservatives supported NAFTA because it would reduce poverty around the world?
It's probably better to assess peoples motivations as they were at the time, not by what happened. A liberal would say they were focusing on the needs of the citizens of their own country and the problem in front of them. In any case, making this a case of liberals vs conservatives is silly, and to my view reductive.
As a citizen of a democracy you have power. Don't abdicate your responsibility, and thus your power, because it's easier to trust someone else handle it.
There are libertarians (even then popular ones like Milton Friedman), that have explicitly argued for open borders and free trade on the basis of the welfare of non citizens. They (at least used to) have considerable purchase among conservatives.
As a category I think it’s also generally correct to say they’d argue for not yielding such power to any sort of decision makers, corporate or government, at all. Instead attempting to coordinate empowered individuals through coercive but distinctly non human forces like markets.
Whether the libertarians are correct or not is one thing, but I don’t think they’ve been hypocritical or inconsistent in their motivations.
> There are libertarians (even then popular ones like Milton Friedman), that have explicitly argued for open borders and free trade on the basis of the welfare of non citizens.
And there are liberal policy makers that look to increase protections for US citizens because they believe in negotiating from a position of moral authority, because without being able to practice what you preach you're easy to point out as hypocritical and ignore, or at a minimum it's easy to convince others to discount your position.
The important thing is that neither side, as a whole, is choosing a position with the intention of hurting local or remote peoples, and to various degrees both succeed and fail on various metrics. Neither side is inconsistent or hypocritical, they're entirely consistent within their own ideology for the most part, it's just that when not within that ideology, it's easy to point at specifics and explain them in terms of someone else's ideology in a way that makes them seem inconsistent.
The first thing I do when I see something lambasting a groups actions as hypocritical or stupid is to try to look into that group's own messaging on what they're doing and why. Sometimes I think their reasoning is flawed, but far more often than not there's a core of truth and consistency and truth to what they're attempting, even in those cases where I think they're working on flawed information.
Before I was willing to call a large group of people hypocritical or inconsistent, I would try very hard to understand their reasoning and how that action it is being presented/sold within that group. The risk of my own biases affecting my judgement is far too high otherwise.
It's probably better to assess peoples motivations as they were at the time, not by what happened. A liberal would say they were focusing on the needs of the citizens of their own country and the problem in front of them. In any case, making this a case of liberals vs conservatives is silly, and to my view reductive.
As a citizen of a democracy you have power. Don't abdicate your responsibility, and thus your power, because it's easier to trust someone else handle it.