Can the Republicans become the party of the working class?
The movement known as national conservatism, which just wrapped up its latest conference in Florida, is trying to answer the basic question: How does the Republican Party, which has historically represented the rich and big business and is still the party of free markets and tax cuts, represent and support its working-class constituents?
Broadly speaking, the national conservative answer has been to combine the Trumpian emphasis on trade and industrial policy with an emphasis on family policy, with some trustbusting impulses added in as well. It’s a vision in which conservative governance supports skilled blue-collar jobs, domestic industry and parents of young children, while seeking to weaken the power of the Ivy League and Silicon Valley.
Having lived through several cycles of attempted right-wing policy realignments, I have a sense of the challenges that make these ventures falter.
The first challenge is that because the Democrats are almost always up for more spending than Republicans, would-be conservative reformers will be outbid by the left. This alone is not a fatal problem. Bipartisanship has its place, and the point of changing the GOP’s economic policy isn’t to simply outdo the Democrats. It’s to make better policy while minimizing the Democratic advantage when it comes to the most basic work of politics, rewarding your constituents.
And in an age of inflation-imposed limits, especially, saying we want to do some of the same thing as Democrats, but smarter and cheaper and without the cultural-progressive baggage is a perfectly reasonable policy ambition and a solid political message. (It’s certainly preferable to: Vote for us, we’ll do nothing except cut taxes on the rich.)
But Trump’s ascent was supposed to change everything, to reveal the total bankruptcy of the existing policy consensus, the need for a conservatism that thinks bigger than tax credits and related tweaks. And that ambition runs into the second challenge facing national conservatives: The fact that inflation, if it lingers, will force ambitious policymakers to make hard choices, and for conservatives those choices are constrained by the right- wing anathema against raising taxes on the rich.
There are exceptions to this ban. You can tax the rich if they’re wealthy liberal institutions. You can tax the upper class by cutting off their tax breaks.
Again, these are both good policies: Our richest universities deserve taxation; the SALT deduction deserves to disappear. But they are self-limited policies, well suited to a modest technocratic agenda but not to, say, the kind of sweeping industrial-policy spending that Steve Bannon once promised Trumpism would deliver — or for that matter the much more generous family policy that might actually increase the American birthrate, or help the pro-life movement make good in its ultimate ambitions.
And a self-limiting tendency, while understandable, points to a plausible future in which national conservatism allows itself to be effectively reabsorbed into the GOP mainstream without having achieved its revolution.
As Park MacDougald observed recently for UnHerd, just in the several years they’ve held conferences, there’s already been a taming of the “natcons.” The first conference was “chaotic, controversial and heterodox in good and bad ways.” But with prominence has come a smoother version, with few fringe provocations but also less heterodox policy substance and more “conventional Republican fare.”
Much of the movement seems ready to rally around Ron DeSantis, which is understandable and, relative to the alternative of Trump redux, prudent. But is DeSantis actually a “natcon,” or just a Republican capable of channeling a populist mood and taking advantage of liberal cultural overreach? And if he’s (probably) the latter, then how much does national conservatism ask of him — and what does the natcon persuasion become if, let’s say, he gets elected president by a narrow margin, some fiscal space opens up, and he uses most of it for the usual GOP round of upper-income tax cuts?
One answer is that a few natcons will peel away into an honorable political irrelevance, while the rest will be content to be “cheap dates,” to quote a former GOP staffer who criticized the natcons to MacDougald.
But that epithet isn’t quite fair: The natcons, like the reformocons and compassionate conservatives before them, have strong noneconomic reasons to remain in the GOP coalition, and as long as the Republican Party is pro-life or ranged against cultural progressivism, they are getting something significant out of the relationship.
What they want, though, is to lead the coalition — to set the right’s priorities across the board and seek a Reaganesque or Rooseveltian majority, rather than just having some boxes checked on their behalf while the GOP tries to grind its way to a tenuous majority. And to get that, they’ll need to find the lever that the predecessors never quite discovered, and somehow move the party to a place where the factions that just want tax cuts are coming, hat in hand, to them.