I think DeLong himself is a lot more wobbly on NAFTA and has said so.  (Though perhaps for different reasons.)

Certainly Blinder's two articles caused a big hue and cry and regardless of his statements that he is a free trader till the end, lots of people questioned his sanity or questioned his commitment.  Just as you question the fair traders that say they are not for protectionism.

And fair traders change (as in the population of fair traders change) over time.

When I got my MBA, I was pretty much a free trader too.  That's what is taught in our ivory towers.  And so I understand and agree that industry protection, and protectionism is not a good thing.  Which is why I was not an industry protectionist then.

But my actual real world experience as an engineer, along with my micro-econ understanding of incentives, along with my understanding and support of the carbon tax leads me to today's fair trade positions: we are in a race to the bottom, destroying all of the wage, health, retirement, safety, vacation, environmental protections that our fathers and grandfathers literally died for.  And we're doing that because our system is providing the wrong economic incentives, because we allow our higher costs that we see as a reasonable cost of production forced to compete with the lower costs of productions of populations that do not get the benefits of worker safety, living wages, environmental protection, 40 hour weeks, health care, etc.

That's a subsidy we provide, not a tariff we charge.

Fair trade is about stopping those subsidies by recognizing the externalities.

I understand little of it beyond seeing jobs in my occupation wither over 20 years and the four courses I took getting my MBA and beyond reading DeLong, Krugman, Rodrik, and others (*) on a daily basis and try to glean what I can out of their jargon.  (Which is what I was doing when apparently you felt I should have been reading the race/iq blogs.)