You can see in that kind of Econ 101 presentation the seeds of why it seems irrelevant and so easily rejected by Right Populists.
1. It focuses attention on consumer losses, inviting naive comparisons of losses to consumers with the gains to producers, analysis of tariffs as a question of distribution instead of efficiency.
2. It leaves out general equilibrium effects, that tariffs do not increase total production because the additional subsidy to import substitution of tariffed goods is offset by tax on non-tariffed items and on exports.
As to why Republicans abandoned free trade (not that they were ever angle pure -- Reagan and Japan) it seems a matter of strategy to adopt "Populist" stances on anything and everything else to focus on the ONE THING THT MATTERS: reducing taxes on high income people.
On Point 2 from your February post: Another factor is the lack of portable mortgages.
I looked at the same question from a politics point of view, I.e. why an anti-trade alliance has emerged on the right of the political spectrum - rather than the left, as one might have expected: https://open.substack.com/pub/thinicemacroeconomics/p/the-right-is-the-new-left?r=1oa8fn&utm_medium=ios
You can see in that kind of Econ 101 presentation the seeds of why it seems irrelevant and so easily rejected by Right Populists.
1. It focuses attention on consumer losses, inviting naive comparisons of losses to consumers with the gains to producers, analysis of tariffs as a question of distribution instead of efficiency.
2. It leaves out general equilibrium effects, that tariffs do not increase total production because the additional subsidy to import substitution of tariffed goods is offset by tax on non-tariffed items and on exports.
As to why Republicans abandoned free trade (not that they were ever angle pure -- Reagan and Japan) it seems a matter of strategy to adopt "Populist" stances on anything and everything else to focus on the ONE THING THT MATTERS: reducing taxes on high income people.