Against a Big-Government GOP

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, February 17, 2022

 

Marco Rubio wants the Re­pub­lican Party to become a “working-class party.”

 

Why?

 

Don’t misunderstand me: There is nothing wrong with the GOP trying to expand its appeal. But Rubio and those who agree with him seem to mean more than that the party must be more inclusive. Instead, they seem to mean that the Republican Party ought to change its approach and become what it has not been for a long, long time: an activist, interfering, micromanaging party that seeks the power of the state to fix economic ills. Talking to Batya Ungar-Sargon, an opinion editor of Newsweek, in February, Rubio suggested that “the most important thing an economy does for a country is create stable, good-paying jobs so that people can start families, get involved in their communities, and retire with dignity. And so,” he continued, “the question becomes: What can we do at the federal level to encourage that kind of economy?”

 

The first inquiry that one must make when examining such calls for change is, “As opposed to what?” Alas, all too often the answer is, “To a straw man.” In the telling of many reformers, the Republican Party is full of cold-eyed, highly effective budget hawks, who have been so assiduous in their successful quest to slash federal spending, shrink the size of the state, balance revenues with expenditures, and strip entitlements to the bone that they have managed to turn the United States into a lean, mean, stock-market-obsessed, libertar­ian paradise that has forgotten about the needs of real people. But, of course, this Republican Party does not exist. Since the 1980s, the GOP has, indeed, been highly effective at cutting taxes. But precisely which government programs has it ever managed to eliminate, reduce, or reform? The only example of retrenchment that comes to mind is the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which, while salutary in its effects, has been much undermined since its passage. If, as Rubio suggests, the federal government is not encouraging the right sort of economy, wouldn’t it be a little strange to add to its already sprawling role?

 

In their recent call for a “new Re­publican Party,” the writers Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Gladden Pappin lamented the “ruthless market ideology” that they believe animates the GOP, but they provided no solid examples. If pushed, many advocates of a “new” Republican Party will point to Paul Ryan’s focus on entitlement re­form as a habit that ought to be kicked. Writing in the Washington Post in January, Henry Olsen warned that, “if Republicans want to become the major­ity party, they have to stop crusading against the entitlement state that helps so many Americans live with dignity and security.” But, clearly, this complaint is deficient, too.

 

For a start, whatever Paul Ryan might have wanted, the GOP has not actually engaged in any meaningful entitlement reform in recent years — and, indeed, by passing Medicare Part D and embracing Donald Trump’s “no cuts” approach to the question, it has tended to do the opposite. Besides, if entitlements do need reforming — and they do — it will not matter much whether Republican voters like it. All too often, political commentators proceed as if what the electorate would prefer were the only question that mattered. It’s not. At some point, programs such as Social Security and Medicare will require intervention from Congress, and when that happens, Republicans will have some hard choices to make that will not be settled by polling or by expressions of fealty to the status quo.

 

Equally baffling is why, exactly, the GOP’s critics believe that its current approach is — or ever has been — a liabil­ity. Despite having forged what is now dismissed as the “dead consensus” (or as “zombie-ism”) and having pioneered the budget-slashing, “trickle-down” politics that supposedly repels the working class, President Ronald Reagan twice came close to winning a majority of its voters. According to the socialist writers Robert and Johanna Brenner, 47 percent of “all blue collar voters supported Reagan” in 1980, while 44 percent of “those from labor union households back­ed him.” In 1984, according to the New York Times’ exit polls, Reagan kept, and perhaps even increased, that share. Over subsequent elections, this number slowly declined, until, in 2016, Donald Trump won 42 percent of union households — the highest level since Reagan.

 

And yet, for all his difference in style and in tone, Donald Trump didn’t move the Republican Party away from its habitual Reaganite pose, either. Instead, he signed a massive tax cut into law, strenuously reduced business regu­lation, resisted the addition of new federal programs, and denounced the Democratic Party for its “socialism and extremism.” If this did him any harm, it is certainly not obvious. Despite the attempts of figures such as Kamala Harris to dismiss the pre-Covid economy as a chimera that was “not working for working people,” the American public seemed thrilled by it. In January of 2020, Gallup reported 62 percent of Amer­icans “saying the economy is ‘excellent’ or ‘good’” and 8 percent “de­scribing it as ‘poor’” — the first time such high scores had been recorded since the year 2000. Even during the 2020 election, American voters consistently preferred Trump to Biden on the economy. If those voters had been in search of more economic intervention, presumably they would have said so.

 

Nor has the state-level Republican Party taken to experimenting with activism. On the contrary: Florida and Texas — the two key laboratories of GOP governance — remain about as Reaganite as they come, boasting no income taxes, relatively small budgets (compared with other big states, such as California and New York), skepticism toward labor unions, tight welfare and unemployment benefits, and an openly big-business stance. It is true that, around the edges, Governor Ron DeSantis has broken this mold. But the sum total of his innovations thus far seems to be a law regu­lating social-media corporations (from which the Walt Disney Company is suspiciously exempt) and a set of rules that prevent most private companies in Florida from imposing vaccine mandates on their customers and employees. If this is the new GOP . . . well, it seems pretty similar to the old.

 

It is telling, perhaps, that despite Rubio’s insistence that “the future” of the Republican Party is “based on a multiethnic, multiracial, working-class coalition” and that its politicians must adapt in response, the sole concrete idea that he has suggested thus far — a law that would allow workers to organize outside of the formal union process, by electing a representative to serve on their corporate boards — was first proposed by the Republican Party back in 1995. Why is this telling? Well, because it is actually rather difficult to contrive a conservative “working class” agenda without causing problems in other areas.

 

In Rubio’s eyes, the GOP’s voters are both concerned about the “availability of good-paying jobs that allow people to raise families, to retire with dignity, to live in safe and stable communities” and worried that the country has “gone too far on this wokeness, political correctness, be-careful-what-you-say stuff.” As far as it goes, this is a fair observation; after all, even ruthless market ideologues such as I want good-paying jobs that allow people to raise families and to see an end to illiberal wokeness. And yet, if Rubio believes that he can achieve those ends with government intervention rather than with the free markets that he has traditionally championed, he will soon find his two objectives at odds with each other.

 

The history of government power in the United States is the history of carefully attached strings. When the federal government pays for something, it ex­pects to set terms. Unless Senator Rubio believes that the Republican Party is going to win every single presidential election for the foreseeable future — or, indeed, that the massive federal bureaucracy is likely to share his anti-woke preferences — he would be ill advised to give Washington, D.C., more control of the everyday lives he hopes to improve. Federal programs that supposedly help create “good-paying jobs” are also federal programs that regulate them. Federal programs that supposedly help people “raise families” are also federal programs that regulate them. Federal programs that supposedly generate “safe and stable communities” are also federal programs that regulate them. And so on. Senator Rubio is correct to push back against what he terms “be-careful-what-you-say stuff.” This being so, he should be wary about further empowering the people who are behind it.

 

Certainly, there is room for a shift in the Republican Party’s tone. The United States is an extremely rich country — so rich, in fact, that every state except Mississippi has a higher per capita GDP than the United Kingdom — and the GOP ought to make clear that it understands that this wealth is just as important to the people who do not own companies as to the people who do. Mitt Romney was correct to jump on top of President Barack Obama’s absurd “you didn’t build that” speech back in 2012, but he would have done well to dispel his rep­utation as a one-track capitalist by fea­turing more than just small- and large-business owners as speakers at the Republican National Convention. A Republican Party that fixes this oversight is a Republican Party that im­proves its fortunes.

 

But there is such a thing as an overcorrection, and how large a shift in tone the GOP needs remains an open question. The United States already has a big-government party — a big-government party that is currently being blamed for overspending, overpromising, inflation, hubris, and a weak economy — and, however one seeks to justify the move, there would seem to be little political advantage for the GOP in being seen as another.