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Nearly forty years ago, US President Ronald Reagan summed up the Republican party mindset with his proclamation that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Markets, not politicians, knew best, and the more power the private sector had relative to the public one, the better.
Not so these days. Consider conservative presidential primary contender Vivek Ramaswamy during the recent Republican debates. Responding to former vice-president Mike Pence’s insistence that Americans (and implicitly the party) didn’t need a new identity or new solutions, Ramaswamy snapped, “It is not morning in America. We live in a dark moment, and we have to confront the fact . . .”
Some Republicans are talking as much about market failures as solutions these days. Consider the on-again, off-again Trump-supporting conservative columnist Sohrab Ahmari, whose recent book, Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It, has been praised by progressives.
Like the former president and other conservatives, Ahmari is against the sort of “woke” capitalism that puts companies in the crosshairs of social justice issues. But he also sounds positively Marxist in his critique of how the owners of capital oppress labour. And the issues he raises about what should and shouldn’t be off-limits in capitalism — he’s against, for example, the commercialisation of child-bearing via interventions like paid surrogacy — aren’t so very different from the moral limits of markets explored by Harvard professor Michael Sandel, a prominent critic of free market orthodoxy, in his book What Money Can’t Buy.
There is much political hay for Republicans to make in connecting the erosion of moral values to the explosion of consumerism in a late stage capitalist society. Former Trump US trade representative Robert Lighthizer, for example, has often criticised neoliberal trade policy (by which he means the unfettered flow of capital and goods to the cheapest and most profitable manufacturing locales) as “trading the future control of our country, the wealth of our children and grandchildren, for current consumption — cheaper TV sets and sneakers. This is madness.”
Such sentiments are simple common sense to most people in the US once you move away from the power hubs on the coasts. As conservative think-tank American Compass has argued, middle-American Republicans and Democrats alike tend to be more interested in income and job growth than the value of their 401Ks. They are willing to sacrifice a certain amount of career advancement in exchange for more family time, have mixed views on abortion and are less likely to see pricey elite colleges as the best way to economic advancement.
You might say they are more interested in community, family and work than wealth. And while “work not wealth” is a Biden policy slug, it also hearkens back to a less extreme kind of capitalism common a few decades ago. At that point many US communities were more economically diverse, focusing on both production and consumption, with less concentration of power within specific industries. There was also far less of the wealth inequality that has risen hand in hand with unchecked markets and greater private sector power.
This is important, because it means that trustbusting could now become a more bipartisan issue. The idea that private sector “tyranny” — in the form of outsized corporate economic and political control — is threatening individual liberty in America is an issue that is being taken up as a rallying point by conservatives and progressives alike.
Of course, conservatives remain conservative when it comes to things such as greater immigration and many social issues, including abortion. But even there, we see some moves to become more pragmatic (witness Republican primary contender Nikki Haley’s calls for a more moderate stance on abortion).
The point here is that Republicans, like Democrats, have begun to see that the next election — indeed the next few elections — are likely to revolve more around economics and class than divisive social issues.
That doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll end up with a Republican presidential candidate who truly cares about working people. Remember that Donald Trump’s great electoral con, which he could still repeat, was telling voters what they knew in their bones to be true — that there is a smoky back room somewhere in Washington where powerful people make deals in their own interest. His solution, of course, wasn’t to air it out, but rather to invite voters in (metaphorically at least) to smoke a big fat cigar with him.
Ramaswamy is certainly less toxic than Trump but he may be equally self-serving. He has decried Reaganomics, but not yet offered a coherent alternative. Indeed, many of his proposals, like shutting down the FBI, IRS and the education department, are impossibly libertarian. So far, the nascent, post-Reagan right has no solid political figure to coalesce around.
Still, I think we will look back and see this primary season as a pivot point. Reaganomics set the frame for economic policy, on both the right and the left, for decades. The fact that Republicans are now turning away from trickle down economics is something business should pay close attention to.
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