The Right’s Elusive Regulatory Populism
Is it real? Or just a cover for the same old libertarian impulses?
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A few weeks ago, I wrote a post titled “The Right’s Economic Populism Is Stillborn.” Today’s post is a follow-up focusing on regulation.
The Right’s Stillborn Economic Populism
As I explained in that earlier post, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign made it sound like he wanted to transform the GOP into a workers party. In addition to turning hard against immigration and free trade, this would amount to a pivot away from the economic libertarianism favored by Rep. Paul Ryan and many of the House members elected in the Tea Party wave election of 2010. Rather than promising to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, Trump vowed to protect them, while also insisting he would replace the Affordable Care Act not with a market-based alternative that would leave millions uninsured but with a new and much better form of universal health coverage.
After Trump won the presidency, this populist turn jump-started the creation of new journals and think tanks to think through what a right-leaning economically populist policy agenda might look like. Yet the Trump administration and its allied majorities in Congress ended up following Ryan’s policy lead—coming just one vote short of repealing ObamaCare without an alternative to protect ordinary Americans from losing health coverage, and passing a massive corporate tax cut.
To judge from developments during the first few weeks of the 118th Congress, the new Republican majority has reverted to Ryanism—passing messaging bills that slash funding for the IRS and propose to replace the progressive income tax with a highly regressive consumption tax. Trump has since weighed in against attempting to cut entitlements as part of any negotiation with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling. That shows he continues to have better political instincts than many members of his own party, who would rather do the bidding of the party’s wealthy donors than take a stand in favor of government programs their voters rely on to pay the bills.
But does Trump’s stance on Social Security and Medicare go beyond posturing? Would real economic populism dominate a second Trump administration? Or, for that matter, a DeSantis administration?
I concluded my original post on this topic by suggesting there was little reason to think so. The economic libertarians continue to dominate the GOP, with the party’s increasingly strident cultural populism mainly serving to distract voters from its bedrock plutocratic policy commitments.
The Fate of Regulatory Populism
But there is yet another dimension to the supposed populist turn that began in 2016. Republicans have long sought to cut taxes for upper-income earners while also eliminating or streamlining regulations on business. But with the Trump-inspired populist turn, those newly founded journals and think tanks, along with a small number of Republican officeholders, began to take a different line. Instead of cutting regulations in the name of free markets, they suggested new regulations could be imposed on business to bring about changes favorable right-wing cultural goals.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has already toyed with some of this in his brawl last year with the Walt Disney Company over the supposed “woke” messages conveyed by its movies and other pop-culture products. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley has gone further to propose numerous new forms of regulation (and antitrust scrutiny) for tech companies. Hawley’s closest ally in the House on these issues is Colorado Rep. Ken Buck.
Are Hawley and Buck at the forefront of a major Republican shift in favor of business regulations designed to advance the common good as they conceive of it, including the economic and moral flourishing of ordinary Americans?
In the Senate, it doesn’t seem so, and not only because Republicans remain in the minority in the chamber. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is a sometime ally with Hawley on these issues, but nothing much has come from their populist turn on regulation. Most of the rest of the caucus is maintaining its distance from Hawley’s anti-libertarian agenda.
As for the House, we learned late last week how much power Buck has been given by party leadership.
Where does that leave us in trying to anticipate the Republican future? I see two options going forward.
Future Option 1: Hyper-Reaganism
Down one path lies what might be called hyper-Reaganism. Reaganism itself was a form of the “fusionism” developed in the pages of National Review during the 1950s and ’60s by author Frank Meyer. The idea was for the right to combine economic libertarianism with moral traditionalism. That, synthesized with a revival of hawkish internationalism in waging the Cold War against the Soviet Union, ended up being Reagan’s distinctively winning blend of positions.
In practice, though, the Reagan administration did little to push moral traditionalism. Instead, most of the administration’s efforts went into enacting tax cuts and regulatory reform, while what became known as the agenda of “social conservativism” was mainly pushed forward by judicial appointments, presidential speeches, and the GOP’s quadrennial party platform. One way of understanding the anger on the right that fueled Trump’s presidential bid in 2016 was as an expression of intense frustration on the part of moral traditionalists that, in comparison with the economically libertarian agenda, so little on the social conservative wishlist since the time of Reagan had been prioritized by Republican presidents and other officeholders.
Put in somewhat different terms, the Republican Party has talked like it’s run by social conservatives but acted like the economic libertarians are calling the shots behind the scenes. Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP promised to reverse this order of priorities. But as this and my earlier post about economic populism have shown, there’s precious little evidence that anything has significantly shifted at the level of concrete policymaking. Maybe the only thing that’s really changed is that the old emphases have been intensified. Trumpian Republicans talk more forcefully about the culture war and work even more intensely to get right-leaning federal judges confirmed while continuing to prioritize the enactment of economically libertarian policies.
Hence the descriptor “hyper-Reaganism”: The GOP today is doing largely the same things it’s been doing since the 1980s, only more so.
Future Option 2: Post-Reaganism
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