Lost me at the end.

Heaping scorn on departures from the free-trade orthodoxy probably succeeds in cowing people who care mostly about their own respectability, but the inevitable result will be to sideline the economists themselves from the policy debates to come.

There is no danger of economists being sidelined from policy discussions, because policy discussions revolve around the prejudices and desires of the rich, not the 'good of the country'. For the rich, it is axiomatic that poors are lazy, coddled and overpaid. So economists delivered theories that said just this. Then the rich realized that they had destroyed their own countries' industrial bases, and that these could not be recovered. Cue the economists who told them that what was needed was freeing capital to go off chasing profits somewhere else, leaving the poors to die in misery. What's next? Economists will be theorizing that what's needed is culling some 7.5 billion poors for fear that we rise up against the rich. But like the soothsayers and entrails readers of old, there is no danger of economists being cut out of the equation, because they are telling the rich whatever they want to hear.

That would be a shame. As the American people, and American policymakers, rediscover the importance of promoting domestic industry and protecting the domestic market,

This will never happen. The rich and powerful will always retain their riches and their power. Or they have, for 10,000 years now. I doubt they will forget how in the near future, or decide that 'democracy' requires them to cede power to the poors. So long as financialization and rent-seeking is more profitable than building a real economy, no one is going to start 'protecting domestic industry'. Even as the MIC realizes they can't win a war with financialization instead of factories producing shells, there is literally no will in government nor in industry to build factories that make shells.