Postscript

 In my last post, I forgot to mention that in 2004 they asked whether American trade policy towards other countries was fair or unfair.  People consistently rated American policy towards them as more fair than their policy towards us, but there were some differences in the judgments regarding different countries:  

The more fair people saw a country's policy towards the US, the more fair they saw our policy towards it.  As I mentioned in my previous post, most people have no experience they can draw on to make these judgments, so I think it's just general feeling about whether we are in a cooperative or antagonistic relationship with them.  

The survey also asked about American trade policy towards "poor countries":  51% said it was fair, 36% unfair.  That is considerably less fair than perceived policy towards the other countries:  it is equal to the lowest value on the y-axis.  They didn't ask about poor countries' policies to the United States.  If you extrapolated from the numbers here, you would say their policies must be seen as highly unfair to the United States.  But I don't think they would follow that pattern:  rather, to some extent people figure that rich and powerful countries will mistreat poor countries.  There's some evidence of that in the figure: of the countries included, Mexico would be seen as the weakest economically (China's per-capita GDP was smaller, but it was already seen as an economic power because of the combination of a large population and rapid growth).   And Mexico is below the line, meaning that American trade policy towards it was seen as less fair than would be expected given their perceived policy towards us. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Totally unfair

Sometimes Donald Trump has said that tariffs are good in themselves and other times he has said that they're just a bargaining chip to get other countries to reduce their trade barriers--that he's working towards free trade.  The one constant is that he believes that other countries have treated us unfairly.  Between 1987 and 2018, there have been a number of survey questions asking if various countries have "fair or unfair trade policies toward the United States."  The list of countries differs, but Canada, Europe*, Japan, Mexico, China, and South Korea have been included pretty frequently.  The figure shows the log of the ratio of "fair" to "unfair" responses (positive numbers on the y-axis mean more people see them as fair; negative mean that more see them as unfair):

Canada is seen most favorably, then Europe, then Mexico and Korea (and India, which was asked about a couple of times), with China at the bottom.  Views of Japan's policy have become substantially more favorable--from 25% fair and 65% unfair in 1987 to 55% fair and 33% unfair in 2018.  South Korea and Europe also seem to have moved upward, while Mexico and China may have moved downward.

The next figure shows the average perceived fairness, adjusted for the nations included in each round (ie, the year effects from a year+nation model). 

It has been higher in the 21st century than in the 1980s and 1990s, although it dropped substantially in 2018.  Unfortunately, the questions weren't asked between 2012 and 2017, so we don't know what people thought during the rise of Trump, and haven't been asked since 2018.  However, the fact that perceived unfairness has been lower in the 21st century--despite the "China shock," the post-2008 recession, and Trump's rhetoric--is important.

On the national differences, most people don't have any direct personal experience on which to base a judgment, so how do they decide?**  In some cases, like Japan in the 1990s and China more recently, there is substantial media coverage.  But the trade policies of Europe, Canada, and South Korea don't generally get much media attention.  An obvious possible influence is general cultural affinity.  Another one is suggested by the upward trends for South Korea and Japan:  people view low prices with suspicion--they figure that someone must be doing something unfair in order to offer them.  So countries that are seen as competing on the basis of quality are viewed more favorably than those that are seen as competing on the basis of price.   

*Under different names:  "Western Europe," then "the Common Market," and more recently "the European Union"

**Don't know answers averaged 13%.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Motes and beams

Starting in May 2020, the Fox News poll asked "do you plan to get a vaccine shot against coronavirus when a vaccine becomes available, or not?"  Once a vaccine became available, they asked people if they had received it; if not, they asked if they intended to.  The figure shows the responses broken down by party.  Before the vaccine became available, it's the log of the ratio of intend/don't intend (ie, omitting don't knows); after, it's the log of the ratio of have/don't intend to (ie, omitting haven't but intend to and haven't and not sure).  

Before the vaccine was available, the only substantial variation among Democrats was that intention was lower in September 2020--the ratio in December 2020 was just a little larger than it had been in May (68%-17% in May and 75%-16% in December).  For Republicans, there was a drop between May and August, and it stayed pretty much constant after that point.  The ratio was somewhat lower in December than it had been in May (54%-29% in May and 49%-39% in December).  Once the vaccine was available, the ratio increased for both--that is, more people got the vaccine than had said they would--but it increased more for Democrats.  In the last survey (August 2021) 84% of Democrats said they had gotten the vaccine and 4% said they they didn't intend to; among Republicans it 56% said they had and 29% that they didn't intend to.  So there was a gap from the beginning, but it grew during 2020 and grew even more after the vaccine became available.  Of course, there's no way to be sure why it grew, but it's reasonable to think that it was because many leading Republican politicians played along with anti-vaccine sentiment.  

The partisan difference in vaccination rates was widely noticed at the time, but hasn't gotten much attention in the five-year retrospectives on Covid.  For example, this  interview with Stephen Macedo, Professor of Politics at Princeton and co-author of a new book on the response to Covid, spends time on school closures, "lockdowns," and dismissal of the lab leak hypothesis, criticizes Democratic governors for following blindly following "elite institutions" and the "laptop class", and praises Ron DeSantis as an example of political leadership: "he got himself informed, and I think he made a sound decision. I don’t know of others who did the same in such a high-profile way."  What about vaccinations?  Macedo acknowledges that "Morbidity from COVID trended upward in Republican states as compared with Democratic states only after vaccines became widely available."  But this point is made in passing and there's no discussion of whether anyone has any responsibility for the trend.  The language is also oddly abstract:  "morbidity trended upward" rather than "more people died" (the language in the rest of the interview was generally clear and straightforward).  

At the moment, it seems like liberals are inclined to think about what their side has done wrong, while conservatives are inclined to think about what the other side (ie liberals) has done wrong.  I don't think this tendency is universal, but the result of a combination of historical circumstances, the most recent being Trump's re-election.  But whatever the source, it has led to a strange blind spot in histories of Covid.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]