[chipotle_coyote]

I'm 99% sure that historically speaking, the OP is correct. Wikipedia's introduction to NAFTA sums up my recollection:

> The impetus for a North American free trade zone began with U.S. president Ronald Reagan, who made the idea part of his 1980 presidential campaign. After the signing of the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement in 1988, the administrations of U.S. president George H. W. Bush, Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney agreed to negotiate what became NAFTA. Each submitted the agreement for ratification in their respective capitals in December 1992, but NAFTA faced significant opposition in both the United States and Canada. All three countries ratified NAFTA in 1993 after the addition of two side agreements, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC) and the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC).

Politically speaking, NAFTA passed in the Clinton administration because he was able to get enough Democrats on board. To this day, free trade doesn't seem to be strongly supported on the left, in part because it's not strongly supported by unions; it's mostly strongly supported by economists, think tanks, and publications that might be characterized more as centrist (the Council on Foreign Relations), center-right (The Economist) or libertarian. I'm not entirely sure why American conservatives in particular moved so strongly against it in the last two decades.

[ardy42]

> I'm not entirely sure why American conservatives in particular moved so strongly against it in the last two decades.

There are a couple of factions that makes up modern American conservationism. I think it was mainly big business/ideological libertarians that were strongly for free trade, but I think they were far from the majority, numbers-wise

[cmrdporcupine]

That flies in the face of the actual policy that was put in place in the Reagan and Bush regimes, and what was advanced or defended by the Republican dominated congresses that existed throughout the 90s.

The 80s and 90s were the era of the FTA and NAFTA, and the rise of the fortunes of the IMF and the WTO. And apart from Clinton in the late 90s this was an era of (for the time) pretty strongly right wing American politics.