After a Lopsided Pro-Establishment RNC Committee Chairmanship Vote, the RINO's Begin to Ponder Next Moves...

 

Some Republicans want the party to break from its longtime free-market agenda and focus instead on the needs and frustrations of workers. Others see danger in moving away from the legacy of Reagan.

Gerald F. Seib, "Can the GOP Become a Real Working-Class Party?"

The drama in the House of Representatives that ended on Jan. 7 with the late-night election of Kevin McCarthy as speaker after four days and 15 ballots revealed a Republican party coping with an identity problem, if not a crisis.

Is today’s Republican party conservative or populist? Is its patron saint Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump? Is it more intent on slashing government spending or preserving entitlement programs? Did it underperform in the 2022 midterm elections because it failed to mobilize its base or because it failed to reassure other voters wary of extremism? The divisive House debate offered no clear answers.

But Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri thinks he has one: The Republican party, he argues, needs to chart its path forward by becoming, finally and unequivocally, the party of the American working class.

Sen. Hawley advanced perhaps the most provocative midterm postmortem when he wrote a piece in the Washington Post declaring that “the old Republican Party is dead.” The much-anticipated giant red wave didn’t materialize in 2022, he wrote, because Republicans have failed to complete a necessary transformation into the party of working-class Americans, who have been drifting into its ranks for years.

Sen. Hawley is at the forefront of a coterie of younger Republicans, in Congress and think tanks, who advocate policies that would mark a sharp break from the conservative, free-market gospel that has been the backbone of the GOP for more than half a century. They argue for abandoning free trade in favor of a network of tariffs to protect American goods and jobs, swearing off cuts to entitlement programs on which the working class rely, breaking up big tech firms, clamping down harder on immigration and finding common ground with union workers.

The incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Jason Smith, promises “a tax code that supports the millions of working-class families.” Sen. Marco Rubio has sponsored legislation that would funnel billions in government help to build or rebuild critical industries on American soil. Sen. Tom Cotton has authored a bill to shift government spending away from college education and toward workplace training programs.

If this sounds like a new formula for activist government, Republican-style—well, it is. In an interview, Sen. Hawley argues that this pivot would represent not a break from Republican beliefs but a return to the principles that guided the GOP in the days of Theodore Roosevelt and William McKinley, when the party was “avowedly a nationalist party.” Moreover, he says the move is politically essential: “We are not a majority party currently. If we want to be a majority party, we have to bring these working-class voters back to us.”

Still, such a pivot will be difficult to execute, with as much potential to tear apart the Republican party as to transform it. The business community, a core constituency that underwrites many GOP campaign efforts, generally prefers free trade over government-managed trade, sees virtue in immigration, and hopes for organized labor to be curbed rather than encouraged.

Others in the party see peril in moving away from what has been a bedrock Republican philosophy: that free-market policies produce broad economic growth that benefits all Americans.

The movement is based on a premise that traditional Republican policies “somehow leave behind the working class,” says retiring Pennsylvania Sen. Patrick Toomey, a free-market conservative. “And of course that’s spectacularly wrong.” In his farewell address in the Senate in December, Mr. Toomey declared: “I hope we resist the temptation to adopt the protectionist, nativist, isolationist, redistributive policies that some are suggesting we embrace.” Others in the party, including some in the new, narrow majority in the House, consider the primary goal at the moment to be reducing government spending and debt, even if that means curbing entitlements.

And meanwhile, of course, Democrats aren’t simply going to let go of their traditional ties to unions and working-class voters. Indeed, President Biden took office vowing to reclaim such workers, and his administration is working on several fronts to rebuild those ties.

Two important forces are propelling this struggle. First, cultural issues and anxieties already have driven many working-class voters into Republican arms, making it necessary and perhaps inevitable that the party would consider doing more to accommodate their economic desires and needs.

Polling by The Wall Street Journal and NBC News in recent years shows the migration. The share of the Republican electorate made up of white voters without a college degree—a reasonable proxy for “working class voters”—has risen from 48% in 2012 to 62% this year. Similarly, VoteCast, a broad national survey of voters conducted by the Associated Press, found that white voters without a college degree picked Republicans over Democrats in 2022 congressional races by a margin of 65% to 32%.

“I think the most significant political shift of the past decade has been the socio-economic inversion of the two parties,” says Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. “Historically, the Republicans were the party of the rich, and the Democrats were the party of the working class.” Now, he contends, that is being reversed. Indeed, both the 2020 general election and the 2022 midterms showed that Republicans are making inroads not just with white working-class voters but with working-class Hispanics and Blacks as well.

Sen. Cruz says that GOP energy policies promoting continued fossil-fuel use, in contrast with Democrats’ focus on climate change, also should be a central part of the agenda. “If you’re a Teamster and Democrats have spent two years trying to shut down trucking across the country, voting for Democrats is profoundly against your interests.”

In some respects, the call for a new economic gospel focused on working-class needs represents an attempt to shift the Republican appeal away from the cultural issues—gay rights, abortion, gun control—that have created a bond with many working-class voters until now and toward economic policies to address their concerns about the loss of manufacturing jobs and declining purchasing power.

Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this shift came late last year, when Mr. Hawley and Mr. Rubio, along with four other Republican senators, voted to force railway companies to give unionized employees additional sick leave in a new labor contract. The measure failed, but the senators’ embrace of an attempt by the government to compel an industry to accept more liberal terms in a labor agreement represented a sharp turn away from traditional Republican reliance on the wisdom of free markets and business leaders.

The second factor is that former president Donald Trump, despite his flaws and the damage he has done to the party in other ways, showed the potential for the Republican party to expand its reach into traditional Democratic constituencies. Indeed, the move to become the working-class party merely represents a continuation, and perhaps culmination, of the trends Mr. Trump unleashed.

Tony Fabrizio, who was a pollster for both of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaigns, argues that Republicans can attract adherents for their ideas for government action now precisely because working-class voters think previous policies have ignored their needs. “The people who are most angry and feel most left behind by government are those voters,” Mr. Fabrizio says.

Political jockeying aside, the struggle for the hearts and votes of the working class continues a long quest to determine what economic philosophy best serves their interests in a 21st-century economy.

Ronald Reagan pushed the Republican party and the country as a whole to the right with his 1980 presidential election. In winning that year, he got the votes of thousands of “Reagan Democrats,” who detached from their traditional moorings in the Democratic party and voted Republican, at least in part out of a feeling that New Deal liberalism had run out of gas and was no longer working for them.

In the decades since, the economic picture for the working class has been mixed. The economic growth set off by the Reagan Revolution has, in fact, been good for a swath of American workers. Median household income has risen dramatically, to $70,784 in 2021 from $55,828 in 1984 in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to data from the St. Louis Fed.

At the same time, though, the manufacturing jobs that long had been the backbone of the working-class economy have been drying up, falling by 23% in the last three decades.

Meanwhile, the new globalized, tech-driven economy has produced growing income inequality between those at the top of the economic ladder and workers in the middle. Between 1980 and 2021, the gap between median income for those in the 90th percentile of American earners and those in the middle 50th percentile grew by 29%.

These trend lines have left many in the working class questioning both parties. Democrats’ traditional grip on the working class has loosened as the base of the party has shifted to wealthier, better-educated, socially liberal constituencies on the coasts. Ruy Teixeira, a political analyst who has long chronicled the political path of American workers, wrote a piece in the Atlantic just before last fall’s midterm elections titled “Democrats’ Long Goodbye to the Working Class.” He says in an interview: “We now have a situation where the Democrats regularly lose the working class vote.”

Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Democrat representing Michigan’s sixth district stretching west and south of Detroit, acknowledges that Mr. Trump “recognized the anxiety of people who‘d just seen their jobs go overseas and were worried about their retirement.”

But she also says that, under the Biden administration, Democratic policies have begun to reverse the trend lines, by spending billions of dollars on jobs improving U.S. infrastructure, creating clean-energy jobs and mounting efforts to bring back to the U.S. factories making, among other things, computer chips.

Rep. Dingell is launching within the House a new “Heartland Caucus,” a coalition of Democrats focused on advancing policies to benefit Americans residing in the broad center of the country. She frames that effort as part of a needed push by Democrats to reconnect with working-class voters, in workplaces as well as farms. “We have not lost them, but we have to remind them that we’re fighting for them,” she says. “We need to be in those union halls, we need to be on those family farms, we need to be in those veterans’ centers.”

On the Republican side, new-wave conservatives argue that Republicans have lost their way by expecting markets to work economic magic and by failing to acknowledge that market forces have been distorted by foreign competitors, particularly China.

Oren Cass, executive director of American Compass, a policy center that is in the forefront of rethinking traditional conservative economic ideas, says that the key for Republicans now is focusing on raising wages and “throwing out the supply-side conceit that if we make things better for capital and those with high incomes, everything will be better.”

Mr. Cass says it is noteworthy that this new conservative economic movement doesn’t automatically put individual tax cuts at the top of the priority list, as was long the case for Republicans. The flaws of that approach, he argues, were illustrated by the disaster that befell former British Prime Minister Liz Truss when she put forth a traditional, aggressive tax-cutting program only to see it lead to economic calamity and her rapid downfall.

Mr. Cass has worked with Sen. Cotton on his proposal for government-assisted workplace training and argues that Republicans can empower workers outside of the traditional big unions that Democrats support by prodding companies to put worker representatives on their boards. He also hopes recent legislation to boost domestic computer-chip production will be followed by similar measures to create incentives for American production of rare-earth minerals, electric-vehicle batteries and pharmaceutical components.

In a similar vein, Rep. Jim Banks, a leader of the House’s conservative Republican Study Committee, argued in a memo to Mr. McCarthy during the last Congress that Republicans should reverse their embrace of globalism. “For far too long,” he wrote, “both parties supported outsourcing working-class jobs overseas in the name of economic growth.”

Sen. Rubio, meantime, chides big corporations not only for shipping jobs overseas but also for embracing “woke” social views of the liberal left. He calls for a set of policies that penalize firms and investors that make certain investments in China and reward those who bring capital back to the U.S.

All this is enough of a departure from the past that it leaves some Republicans worried that their party is drifting toward mimicking Democratic reliance on government solutions and abandoning principles that have brought great electoral success.

“We have to get back to the basic principles of Reagan and Bush and build upon them, and add to those the questions of crime, education and, of course, inflation,” says Frank Fahrenkopf, a former national chairman of the Republican party.

The most difficult internal GOP debate may come on the question of entitlements—specifically the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs that make up a growing piece of the federal spending.

In the prolonged House debate over choosing a new speaker, lawmakers frequently bemoaned the rising federal debt and the spending that is driving that debt, framing the problem as a kind of national crisis. And those opposing Mr. McCarthy as speaker used their leverage to force into place procedures that will make it easier for them to compel big, across-the-board spending cuts to handle the problem.

That at least implies a willingness to curb the big entitlement programs as part of the corrective effort. Sen. Hawley argues that would be a mistake. “I would warn against immediately going to working-class people and saying, ‘The Social Security and Medicare benefits you have been paying for is where we are going to go first.’”

Note:
Mr. Seib retired last year as the Journal’s executive Washington editor and weekly Capital Journal columnist. He has served most recently as a fellow at the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas.