Republicans are becoming economic populists again. That's a good thing
In 1956, the Republican party met for its national convention in San Francisco and laid out a platform that won President Dwight D Eisenhower a second term in office. The Republican platform boasted about raising the minimum wage, expanding social security and increasing the number of workers joining unions.
But in the decades following, the party drifted away from economic populism and the belief that the machinations of government could be put to work to tame the market and empower workers.
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” Ronald Reagan quipped in 1986. Under Reaganism, the conservative intelligentsia came to view the market as supreme – often in opposition to its own voting base.
That is still the case. Today, 50% of Republican voters support Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax proposal, but not a single Republican in Congress does.
But there are signs that economic populism may be returning to the Republican party.
At a recent conservative conference in Washington DC, Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri, told attendees that an “economy driven by money changing on Wall Street ultimately benefits those who have the money to start with, and that economy will not support a great nation”.
This is the sort of language you would typically associate with a Republican lawmaker in the pre-Reagan years, when it produced senators such as Wisconsin’s Bob La Follette, a thundering
populist who took on railroad companies and defended small farmers.
Lest you think that Hawley is all talk, the legislation he has introduced suggests he is breaking from the Republican establishment in real ways.
He has introduced a bipartisan bill to ban the sale to minors of predatory video game “loot boxes”, an addictive technology that is being used by the electronic gaming industry to suck money out of children. His drug pricing bill would ban pharmaceutical companies from charging Americans more for the same prescription drugs than they charge to customers in other industrialized countries.
His college debt legislation would hold well-off colleges and universities directly accountable for offering expensive or mediocre educations to their students; the bill would require institutions to pay off 50% of the balance of loans of students who default. Legislation he introduced with the Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin would impose fees on foreign capital in order to revalue the dollar in a way that would increase US exports.
Perhaps his biggest foe is Silicon Valley, which he blames for pursuing a “business model of addiction”. He has introduced legislation that would ban certain social media company practices – such as autoplay videos and endless scrolling – that he blames for manipulating human psychology.
The conservative establishment’s response to Hawley’s crusade against these powerful economic titans has been skeptical. The National Review’s David French argued that Hawley’s bill regulating big tech practices was an “affront to limited government and personal responsibility”.
Arguments in favor of limited government and personal responsibility have their place, but the conservative movement’s modus operandi has long been to advocate personal responsibility for society’s poorest and most vulnerable but not society’s most powerful. Who has held big tech responsible for its role in promoting technologies that may foster addiction and suicide? Is the pharmaceutical industry acting responsibly when it is pricing drugs out of the reach of ordinary Americans?
When a younger Hawley sat down and wrote a book about a towering Republican figure in 2008, he chose to profile not Reagan but Teddy Roosevelt, the progressive populist Republican president from the early 20th century. Writing about Roosevelt in a 2010 essay, Hawley is clearly wary of too much intervention by the government into the economy, but he also recognizes that individuals alone can’t create the opportunities necessary for everyone to thrive.
“Theodore Roosevelt and the strand of Progressivism he represented may have assigned government too great a role in reforming society, but Roosevelt was right to recognize that society and liberty go together,” Hawley writes. “Self-determination requires a certain social context.”
We shouldn’t expect Hawley to transform into Bernie Sanders. He is not an advocate of democratic socialism, and it is important for us to have parties with distinct visions that offer voters genuinely contrasting choices. But for too long, the Republican party has embraced market libertarian thinking that pretends that the solution to any social problem is a change in individual behavior.
While it’s true that we all choose the paths we walk, we don’t create the paths. None of us as individuals can simply conjure up an alternative to overpriced insulin. We can’t just use another social media service when Google and Facebook are monopolies. Roosevelt understood that and it appears Hawley does as well.
The question is whether the Republican party will heed the Missouri senator’s warnings about where conservatism has gone wrong.
Zaid Jilani is a Bridging the Divides writing fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good magazine, and a freelance journalist