[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.