In the Faux-DeLong debate, I end up on the side of Faux. The work that Jeff has produced through the years has been a critical counter-voice to the prevailing liberal economic wisdom--and without the Economic Policy Institute, our democratic--and Democratic--economic thought would be more tunnel vision and Republican lite than expansive thought that might actually solve the daily problems of working Americans.

It's pretty interesting, indeed, how much the trade debate still raises the temperature among progressives, liberals, left-liberals-who, otherwise, agree on a whole lot. At a salon of lefty journalists and thinkers (not to imply that journalists aren't thinkers...) that I ran in NYC for several years, this debate divided the room in ways I never envisioned. The only thing that split in more ways (and led to some splits in the group itself) was the war in Iraq.

But I'd like to suggest that with all our differences in the Democratic camp on economics, and especially on trade policy, there is an important bit of agreement that didn't exist when this whole trade debate fueled earlier presidential seasons--that's a near uniformity in support of unions, unionization, the need for stronger unions, in order to build and rebuild America's middle class.

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