The Economist has two interesting articles on the changing views of the right and left in America. One article (entitled “Frenemies”) discusses their convergence on economic issues:
Normally, you need read only the first six or seven words of a senator’s sentence to be able to correctly surmise his party. See if you can tell from the next 40 or so, an extract culled from a prominent senator’s recent book: “Today, neoliberalism is in. In the eyes of our elites, the spread and support of free trade should come before all other concerns—personal, political and geopolitical. In recent years this has led to a kind of ‘free-market fundamentalism’.” Suppose you were given a hint. The three proposed solutions for the neoliberal malaise are: “putting Wall Street in its place”, bringing “critical industries back to America” and resurrecting “an obligation to rebuild America’s workforce”.
If you guessed a Democrat—perhaps even more cleverly Bernie Sanders writing in his recent work, “It’s ok to be Angry About Capitalism”—you would be wrong. It was in fact Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida and one-time presidential contender, writing in his just-published book, “Decades of Decadence”. . . .
The diagnoses from the new right and new left of what ails America are strikingly similar. Both sides agree that the old order that prized expertise, free markets and free trade—“neoliberalism”, usually invoked as a pejorative—was a rotten deal for America. Corporations were too immoral; elites too feckless; globalisation too costly; inequality too unchecked; the invisible hand too prone to error.
Another article discusses the likely policies of a second Trump administration. They point out that Trump’s 2016 win was a surprise, and he was forced to rely on mainstream Republican officials for policymaking. According to The Economist, a second Trump term would be far different:
Once a second Trump administration had bent the bureaucracy to its will, what policies would it pursue? The department-by-department plans being drawn up at AFPI, Heritage and elsewhere give some guidance. They involve some predictable fusillades in the culture wars, such as completing a wall along the border with Mexico and directing all federal officials to consider only people’s biological sex, rather than “self-identified” gender. But some of the putative policy agenda is both more sweeping in scope and more of a break with past Republican orthodoxy.
One such area is the economy. The new right is enthusiastic about the kind of industrial policy the Biden administration has pursued. “No one in Ohio…cares that the Wall Street Journal editorial board doesn’t like the chips bill on free-market economic grounds,” J.D. Vance, a senator, recently told a gathering at American Compass, a think-tank, referring to a law subsidising semiconductor factories. In some cases Mr Trump’s supporters would go further: Mr Vance advocates taxing companies that shift work offshore.
The same pattern is playing out in Europe, where far right parties are on the rise and are capturing the votes of blue collar workers that once voted socialist or communist. In Europe, both political extremes now favor statist policies, but the right gains votes through its more aggressive cultural conservatism.
In the not too distant future, politics in the Western world will become almost unrecognizable to those of us who came of age in the 20th century.
READER COMMENTS
Richard W Fulmer
Aug 3 2023 at 12:53pm
A long-standing complaint of the populist right has been that there is no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. Their solution? Adopt the Democratic economic agenda lock, stock, and industrial policy.
Thomas Hutcheson
Aug 3 2023 at 5:49pm
The old horseshoe strikes again.
If one’s primary interest is obtaining power to redistribute income, not in advancing any other particular goal, then one gravitates to the lowest common denominator rhetoric.
Mark Z
Aug 3 2023 at 9:37pm
Is it really that unrecognizable to you? Didn’t you grow up at a time when a Republican president was imposing price controls and outdoing his Democratic predecessor at social democracy? Not long ago Bryan Caplan, on his blog, posted a couple lectures by Ralph Raico from the 90s about adversaries of classical liberalism in the 18th and 19th century, and how contemporary conservatives were critical of markets for reasons reminiscent the socialists of the era. So, at least if one has a long enough historical memory, it’s not really unrecognizable, but rather history repeating itself. Enthusiasm for the market economy seems almost predictably cyclical.
Scott Sumner
Aug 3 2023 at 10:54pm
One trend that has surprised me is the GOP becoming the party of blue collar workers and the Dems becoming the white collar party. I recall when West Virginia was very Democratic and Virginia was very Republican.
Mark Z
Aug 5 2023 at 1:45am
Reagan did alright with blue collar voters, didn’t he? And Whats the Matter with Kansas was written almost 20 years ago, so widespread blue collar conservatism doesn’t seem that novel. West Virginia was always a pretty conservative state. It was just represented by conservative democrats. It’s more the composition of the parties than the underlying ideology of the state’s populace that’s changed, and it’s not overly surprising. I think if you told a Dem/Rep strategist in 1980, ‘over the next 40 years you’re going to lose many blue dog democrats/Rockefeller republicans to the other party,’ they probably wouldn’t say, ‘whoa that’s crazy.’ They’d say, ‘damn, we were worried that would happen.’
BC
Aug 5 2023 at 2:48am
As the GOP becomes the blue collar party, it takes on many characteristics of the old Democratic blue collar party, most notably on protectionism, industrial policy, and entitlements. However, the Democrats’ white collar party seems more different from the GOP’s old “country club” white collar wing. While some Democrats support trade, they seem to less out of an understanding of markets and economic efficiency than a belief that we must be good “global citizens”, e.g., that protectionism is not so much inefficient as it’s parochial and harms international relations. Obviously, the Democrats’ version of a white collar party still favors maximizing taxes, spending, and regulations, and the old GOP country club wing was decidedly unwoke. A party of white collar men may be much different than a party of white collar women. The GOP blue collar party and the old Democratic blue collar party are/were both parties of blue collar men. Blue collar men also don’t seem that different politically from blue collar women.
Dylan
Aug 5 2023 at 8:20am
Outside of the south and unions, hasn’t that shift been a long time coming? At least since Regan, it seems that most non-union blue collar folks I knew were Republicans and suspicious of free trade.
Michael Sandifer
Aug 4 2023 at 1:34am
There’ve long been many on the left, such as myself, who thought many “conservatives” in the US would eventually support liberal economic policies, because they would see it as being in their interest. We thought they’d come at it from the fascist direction, and we were right. We knew they were deeply bigoted and fascist all along, though they’ve become even more so in recent years.
That’s not the main problem though, because it was always there. The main problem is the total loss of confidence in government, the media, and other institutions, to the point of conspiracy theory suspicion. That’s why there are no guardrails when it comes to testing the system anymore. And most conservatives can no longer honestly call themselves “conservative”. They are reactionary revolutionaries, who now favor authoritarianism.
Still, the fact that the US economy is a good bit smaller than people thought it would be 10 and 20 years ago is a huge aggravating factor, and leads the ill-informed on the right to blame immigrants and various other minorities, corporations, and the elite for the disappointment they face. The ill-informed left blames rich people, corporations, business elites. The only thing remarkable about the resorting of the parties is how complete it has become.
Of course, the Republican Party is now torn between its base and wealthy individual and corporate donors. People like Mitch McConnell, who’ve long lied to Republican base voters no longer have any sway over them, outside of their homes states. Recall all of the performative Obamacare repeal votes, for just one example… The party seems increasingly led by the most extreme in its base.
Sadly, for the ill-informed right and left, I don’t actually think these particular liberal policies are in the broad national or global interest. Quite the contrary, actually.
Richard W Fulmer
Aug 4 2023 at 2:17pm
A danger of increasing the government’s power, whether you come from the left or the right, is that sooner or later, the other side will control that power.
Michael Sandifer
Aug 5 2023 at 7:07am
Yes, we must roll back the “Imperial Presidency”.
MarkW
Aug 4 2023 at 6:13am
In the not too distant future, politics in the Western world will become almost unrecognizable to those of us who came of age in the 20th century.
I would say that it already has become so to me, but that ordinary life and economics has a lot of inertia, so when you turn away from the news and the net, things still look very recognizable. Both parties are against free trade and for industrial policy, but free trade goes on mostly as always and most industries are not much affected…yet. When will this ‘calm before the storm’ end? Or will the effect of all the craziness be limited and blow over before it truly changes or society and economics root and branch? I wish I was confident that the US and western Europe were somehow immune from becoming something like much larger versions of Argentina, but at this point, I’m really not sure.
BC
Aug 5 2023 at 2:31am
For what it’s worth, I was able to correctly identify the speaker as Republican after 10 words. The giveaway was the term “elites”. Democrats blame trade policy on greedy corporate interests. The point about convergence still stands, of course.
I don’t know what’s going on in Europe, but I think the commonality between populist left and right is victimhood culture. The defining line of Trumpism is not, “Make America Great Again.” It’s, “I will stop other countries from taking advantage of us.” Conservative populists view trade (and everything else) as elites taking advantage of the working class and other countries taking advantage of the US. Progressive populists view trade (and everything else) as powerful interests exploiting “structural power imbalances”. That’s why one can identify which is which not by the policy, e.g., protectionism or industrial policy, but by how they label the purported victim and/or victimizer.
If one is convinced that one’s coworkers are conspiring against oneself, then one will probably have a difficult time achieving success at work. That’s because success requires meaningfully contributing to the employer’s activities. Hard to do if one is focused on trying to figure out one’s coworkers’ next secret scheme. Similarly, it’s hard to figure out the most efficient allocation of global economic resources — what should be produced where, by whom, and in what quantities — if one is solely focused on identifying how whatever system emerges favors elites or reflects structural power imbalances.
From what I have read about Europe’s nationalists, they also seem to have a strong sense of self-victimhood.
Michael Sandifer
Aug 5 2023 at 7:06am
The problem here is that no one knows what the most efficient allocation of resources should be, which is why we should have free trade.
Bobster
Aug 5 2023 at 4:25pm
Policy wise Trump was pretty neoloberal with his deregulation and tax cuts.
Now there is the immigration and trade issues, but he pushed to increase skilled immigration, passed a new NAFTA and tried to bring back the TPP.
Jon Murphy
Aug 6 2023 at 6:44am
No, he didn’t. He strongly opposed skilled immigration and made it more difficult.
And a worse, less free version of NAFTA along many margins.
He withdrew the US from the TPP.
Anders
Aug 6 2023 at 6:19am
If anything, and under Trump especially, the US republicans are in their rhetoric more redistributionist and as statist, albeit on different issues, than the Democrats pretty much since Clinton and Bush. The massively overblown difference is between the antics of nativism and a highly coercive approach to social justice. In a country founded on the tenets of enlightened liberalism, you have to be as extreme as Ron Paul to be heard at all with a liberal stance. Even Trumps ostensibly liberal decisions reek of irresponsibility: the tax reform was poorly targeted and exacerbated the already crippling complexity of loopholes and costs of compliance; and I would be surprised if the cuts in environmental regulation actually focused on duplication, results of capture, and rules that would not stand up to cost benefit analysis even with highly partisan assumptions and costing.
In a country that spends twice as much on welfare than the theoretical cost of bringing everyone above the poverty level, and where public funding of healthcare per person is higher than Sweden, where it is provided almost free of charge to users, the cost of crowding out liberal voices is crippling. With swathes of the private sector stymied by corporatism and oligopolies, it is perhaps only a quarter of the economy that, with extraordinary success, keeps the engine humming. In contrast to Europe, crime and unemployment among immigrants, including « illegal » ones, are non issues. In fact they are significantly more successful than the average.
But we might forget that even the halcyon days of Eisenhower saw McCarthyism and corporatism rampant enough for a decorated general to voice publically severe concerns about the military industrial complex. Kennedy was a hawk that risked nuclear confrontation. Fdr admired Mussolini and broke the two term tradition twice. The choice between lbj and Goldwater was perhaps not much less divisive than that between Hillary and Mr Orange. And up until the Restoration the union was constantly in question, eventually only maintained by military force.
My theory is that partisanism rather than ideology is the driving force. And has always been. As for Europe, the issue is much less pronounced, and much of it stems from wholesale imports of US issues and positions. Sweden saw blm rallies although the tiny Subsaharan African minority is socioeconomically above average, as most of them are former students at leading universities that decided to stay (Somalians and Eritreans being the exceptions, but they, as Nubians, would blanche at the notion of being black).
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