GOP taps into big government perks

The Republican Party is no longer primarily a small government, free market political enterprise. Instead, the dominant faction within the party has become the populist right.

The emphasis of the populist right is on cultural issues, such as immigration, gun control and combating woke ideology.

Compared to Democrats, Republicans still favor smaller government and less regulation of markets. However, those are no longer the animating differences, as they had been since the Reagan revolution. In particular, there is no longer the respect for, and deference to, free markets that was a defining characteristic of the GOP from Ronald Reagan until Donald Trump.

This is well on display by several bills that have or are making their way through the Republican majorities in the Arizona Legislature.

The highest profile was the mask mandate fight during the COVID-19 pandemic.

For reasons still not obvious, not wearing a mask became a cultural and political emblem within the populist right. Republicans in the Legislature sought to ban their required use.

But they not only wanted to forbid governments from requiring them, but also prohibit businesses from requiring them for employees or customers.

Small government, free market conservatism would argue against government mandating masks. But it would hold that whether businesses require them of employees and customers in the midst of a pandemic was up to the owners of the businesses.

The populist right was eager to deploy the heavy hand of government to override the right of business owners to make their own risk evaluations and decisions regarding COVID-19.

There’s a more amusing example making its way through the Legislature this session: a bill (House Bill 2323) prohibiting insurance companies from considering the breed of dog owned in deciding whether to issue a homeowner’s or renter’s policy or what to charge in premiums.

Now, there is no reason to believe that a gaggle of politicians have a superior faculty for risk assessment regarding dog bites than insurance actuaries. Or that insurance companies have an irrational prejudice against certain dog breeds, or don’t want to compete for the business of certain dog owners.

For small government, free market conservatism, this is clearly a place to respect and defer to the market. Yet a narrow majority of Republicans in the House voted for it.

Nearly half of the Republican caucus did oppose it. It was put over the top by Democrats. Perhaps identity politics includes social justice for pit bulls.

A populist right idea that did fail in the House was a prohibition (House Bill 2656) on financial institutions using ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) criteria in making lending or investment decisions.

Now, in this case, ESG investment mandates are an important national issue. There are attempts by federal regulators to require ESG criteria to be used in making lending and investing decisions. And some left-wing investment funds are using their market position to force companies into falling in line with liberal orthodoxy on these matters.

It is squeezing some politically disfavored industries out of the capital markets, such as oil and natural gas companies whose expansion has been an international security issue.

The answer, however, is to fight against the regulation on the national level and restrict the ability of investment funds from voting proxies for shares they hold on behalf of others.

It isn’t, at the state level, to prohibit the use of ESG criteria in investing and lending. If some private parties want to pool their funds and deploy them to further some social objectives in addition to making a buck, small government, free market conservatism holds that they should have the right to do so.

The populist right is willing to use the heavy hand of government to forbid it because they oppose the cultural statement it makes and advances.

For this bill, Democrats weren’t willing to put it over the line, since they agree with and support ESG requirements. The bill failed because two Republicans, Michelle Udall and Joel John, joined the Democrats in opposition, albeit presumably for entirely different reasons.

But only two of the 31 Republicans in the House took the small government, free market position. The rest joined the populist right stampede over a free market right of association.

The political bottom line is that, with the domination of the populist right in the Republican Party, small government, free market conservatives don’t have a reliable vessel for political action.

And the drift is accelerating.