Did that nationalist rhetoric fade when the Japanese economy began to decline?
Well, it s more complicated than that. The populist buy-American movement peaked during the early 1990s, when the notion that we could fix the economy by buying U.S. products was very attractive to unemployed and anxious workers. These ideas were somewhat deflated by the anti-NAFTA campaign in 1993. The activists behind that campaign were able to push a more sophisticated analysis of international economics to the foreground. They helped people realize that there s no such thing as a pure “American” product because corporations finance, design, manufacture, and assemble their products in so many different locations. The NAFTA fight showed people that they have to a lot in common with, for instance, workers in Mexico. So what s wrong with buy-American campaigns? Well, what s the goal? Ideally, buy-American campaigns want to protect good domestic jobs. But some of these campaigns have also been financed by anti-union moguls like the textile magnate Roger Milliken or William Randolph Hear
