Stephan Savoia/AP Photo
Workers at a New Balance shoe factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 2017
Since Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, a small group of heterodox conservatives has struggled to develop a “pro-worker” politics for the right. New think tanks such as American Compass, headed by former Mitt Romney adviser Oren Cass, have rolled out arguments for industrial policy and family policy, while Compact magazine, a putative vehicle to blend cultural conservatism and social democracy, launched this past spring, expanding the fora for conservative statecraft and right-wing populism that Julius Krein’s American Affairs spearheaded shortly after Trump’s inauguration in 2017.
These institutions and thinkers are united by two premises: that modern liberalism has radically atomized society and that Trump’s attacks on globalism and China were fundamentally correct. But their main apostasy, in the ad-libbed words of Trump’s U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer in a recent speech at the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, is that libertarianism is “a philosophy for stupid people.” Disavowing the neoliberal logic that drove Republican policy from the end of the Cold War until Trump’s election, heterodox conservatives declare they have a developmental agenda that will restore security and prosperity to American workers.
The economic nationalism shared by Trump and Lighthizer—along with the supply chain crisis unleashed by the pandemic—undoubtedly catalyzed a marked shift in the way the Democratic Party views globalization, which has led the Biden administration to pursue an expansive industrial strategy that promises to create better jobs and wages. But this leaves conservative reformists with few other ideas to offer outside of intellectual grandstanding.
Several critiques have focused on the limpness of the conservative agenda for workers, which includes retrograde business unionism and embarrassingly meager proposals to raise the minimum wage. What is equally striking, however, is the almost total lack of reference to past Republican leadership and accomplishments. Contemporary progressives invoke the policies of presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson to build support for social democracy, even as they condemn the racist and imperialist features of the New Deal order. By contrast, Sohrab Ahmari, a co-founder of Compact, for instance, has identified European Christian Democracy, rather than past examples of Republican statecraft, as a model for the American right.
There is a Republican tradition, springing mostly from a sense of patrician obligation and public service, that did seek to strengthen the social contract, and was further compelled by the rise of trade unions and middle-class interest groups. The problem for heterodox conservatives is that whether they were “good government” moderate reformers or progressive insurgents, most of those Republicans of the past were what they now call Democrats. The history of pro-government and labor-friendly Republicans was written out of the conservative story by the Reagan Revolution, and this disconnect speaks to the impossibility of heterodox conservatives reconciling their aspirations to be a “workers’ party” of the right with the clear constraints of their policy aims.
IN THE OLD MANUFACTURING CORE of the Northeast, reformers such as Massachusetts governor Curtis Guild and New York governor Charles Evans Hughes were responsible for securing some of the more advanced labor and utility laws before the New Deal realignment. Further west, key insurgents such as the La Follettes of Wisconsin, George Norris of Nebraska, and Hiram Johnson of California campaigned for corporate regulation, expansive public works and egalitarian developmental programs (including what became the Tennessee Valley Authority), and progressive taxation, all of which directly influenced Franklin Roosevelt’s agenda.
The problem for heterodox conservatives is that whether they were “good government” moderate reformers or progressive insurgents, most of those Republicans of the past were what they now call Democrats.
When one surveys the mix of reforms that were once supported by factions within the GOP, it’s clear that the party’s positive contributions to political economy reflected a synthesis of the Hamiltonian “developmental” tradition of promoting economic growth via domestic industry and technological progress, and policies that were broadly constitutive of American liberalism. Thus, while some reforms were intended to preempt more progressive legislation, others, such as the statewide health insurance program that California governor Earl Warren attempted to enact in the 1940s, were squarely in the vein of what today’s Democrats support.
It must be emphasized that, outside of the left-leaning progressives, most Republican reformers were corporate liberals who saw market regulation as a means to make capitalism more rational. It was consistent with the advance of large corporations that increasingly proclaimed support for basic “American” values like pluralism and equal opportunity. However, this did not prevent these reformers from recognizing the value of public or civic goods like schools, parks, and conservation, and that certain limits on capital and markets were themselves a public good. While some reformers in the Progressive Era held social Darwinist and white supremacist views that were common among elites in that time period—reinforcing both nativist and assimilationist tendencies in the GOP—the party’s mid-century welfare capitalists supported liberalizing immigration and upheld the party’s tradition of supporting civil rights. Until the Reagan realignment, moreover, Republicans had the edge over Democrats when it came to support for a woman’s right to an abortion. Heterodox conservatives today stand far apart from that Republican reform tradition, to the point of not recognizing its existence. That’s because Reaganism set strict limits on how far conservative domestic policies can go to benefit social welfare. Today’s would-be reformers still struggle with those ossified boundaries.
For instance, they cannot bring themselves to accept that essential pillar of social democracy: decommodification. Instead of decommodifying labor through more generous social insurance and public housing—two key ways to prevent the dislocation of working-class families in the event of grave hardship—heterodox conservatives have proposed to subsidize family formation. Behind these plans lurks not only a regressive view of gender but a narrow conception of social citizenship. For example, the latest version of Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-UT) proposed Family Security Act, which the heterodox right has framed as a meaningful alternative to the expanded Child Tax Credit that expired last year, now excludes the country’s poorest families.
At most, heterodox conservatives want to increase or create benefits in the tax system for lower-income people who want to start families, rather than shift the fundamental balance of power in the economy. This approach to inequality continues to be reflected in their position on trade unions. Beyond Ahmari’s professed sympathy for Amazon workers, the heterodox right has conspicuously failed to rally on behalf of the labor organizing wave that has spread since the pandemic, despite an extended dialogue in American Compass about how to improve labor policy on behalf of workers.
This lack of genuine interest in trade unionism is reflected in the impact from the heterodox right on GOP lawmakers more generally: Republicans in Congress have been unanimously against allowing organizing in their own offices, let alone legislation to improve organizing more broadly.
At the same time, heterodox conservatives have lacked any determination to devise policies that would secure universal public health insurance. Even in the heyday of Republican reformism, few had the conviction or the strength to coalesce with liberal Democrats around health reform, to translate “shared prosperity” into positive rights. But today, the non-libertarian right cannot even muster the market-friendly national health insurance policy that Richard Nixon entertained 50 years ago, let alone consider that “Medicare for All” or a comparable program would greatly alleviate the precariousness afflicting workers. The “replace” side of the movement to repeal Obamacare was a mess, and reform conservatives have had nothing to add to it.
THE DEEP RELUCTANCE TO ACCEPT the merits of a universal welfare state ultimately weakens the vision of self-government extolled by Lighthizer and other heterodox conservatives. To his credit, Lighthizer has said that “economic division” has grown “at an alarming rate,” with “the rich [getting] richer and many [falling] out of the middle class.” This makes him a rare voice in the GOP to recognize the main source of community decline in the industrial heartland, even as he considers “this wealth transfer” as having primarily gone to China, not American business elites.
Yet, in lambasting welfare checks and the glut of “cheap stuff” from low-wage exporters, Lighthizer seems to think that 19th-century prescriptions to shield industry and stimulate development are all that is needed to promote worker well-being. Cradle-to-grave health care, however, would help replenish the powers of association in American communities to which the Republican Party historically paid tribute. It would give workers the freedom to invest in their communities, relieving them of the desperate burden to always set aside income for emergencies that most cannot afford.
A political orientation that was truly concerned with the precariousness of working families would at the very least elaborate ways to combine the best elements of industrial policy with measures that bring the United States in line with the welfare states of Europe.
Rather than embrace this cause, the heterodox right continues to prioritize the culture war. References to Europe trumpet the “civilizational” discourse of right-wing nationalists in Hungary and Poland and are part and parcel of any discussion of their respective family policies. It is perhaps unsurprising that heterodox conservatives emphasize Viktor Orban’s model in Hungary, which is arguably more parsimonious than the welfarist cash transfer schemes deployed in Poland. In domestic politics, meanwhile, heterodox conservatives remain aligned with propagandists like Christopher Rufo and right-wing foundations that want to destroy public education and privatize what other few public goods remain.
The heterodox project therefore not only fails to build on past Republican legacies, it pales in comparison. The conundrum for heterodox conservatives boils down to this: If there is a legacy to salvage from the Republican Party of several decades ago, it has already been adapted by the modern Democratic Party—a point that Krein himself effectively granted in an article discussing the potential of “supply-side liberalism” to realign the electorate.
In an alternate universe with different political realignments, one could imagine Elizabeth Warren, with her focus on consumer protection, as a progressive Republican, or Gavin Newsom as one of the liberal technocrats that once characterized the GOP’s mainstream. As it stands, the Biden administration continues to move forward on industrial policy, the main area in which heterodox conservatives have offered substantial and persuasive arguments. But unless they come to terms with the principles of decommodification and social citizenship—while also affirming, without a trace of doubt, the legitimacy of democratic elections—their project will remain a sham.
