The GOP establishment must acknowledge that the Trump campaign has surfaced important and uncomfortable truths. Those truths can no longer be evaded.
If the Republican Party is to have a future, it must learn from Trump’s rise. By launching a frontal attack on movement conservatism, Trump has demonstrated its weakness and the failure of its stale policy agenda to resonate with voters. In doing so, he is giving conservatives a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change direction.
There is only one way forward in the post-Trump era. The GOP can no longer survive as the party of tax cuts for the rich. It must reinvent itself as the champion of America’s working- and middle-class families. In every campaign, Democrats and Republicans talk about getting the working class and the middle class back on their feet. Those are almost always empty words. The GOP must now become a genuinely populist party, putting the concerns of voters ahead of those of donors. The alternative will be a decade or more of marginalization and defeat, during which the left will have free rein.
Following this path will be uncomfortable for a Republican elite that has grown accustomed to getting its way, and to selling an agenda that’s best suited to the interests of the already well-to-do as an agenda for America. While tossing aside long-held orthodoxies will be difficult, it is absolutely necessary. By embracing populism, this new GOP will have the potential both to speak to Trump’s voters and to grow the party’s base, uniting voters across lines of race, class, and region.
What might a more populist GOP agenda look like? Here is a brief sketch of how the party can change course.
A Pay-Your-Own-Way Immigration Policy
No issue better illustrates the divide between elite Republicans and the party’s base. One recent survey found that a large majority (67 percent) of Republicans favor decreasing immigration levels while only 7 percent of them favor an increase. Nevertheless, leading Republicans, including Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, have backed proposals that would greatly increase immigration levels in defiance of the Republican grassroots. Trump, meanwhile, has used incendiary language to electrify Republicans who oppose immigration.
What accounts for this divide between the policies prominent Republicans have backed and those favored by rank-and-file GOP voters? For high-income Republicans, skilled immigrants are their colleagues, neighbors, and friends, and less-skilled immigrants provide them with the low-cost child care, restaurant meals, and other services that allow them to lead comfortable lives. These affluent conservatives thus take a morerelaxed approach to immigration, which is reflected in the immigration reform proposals they’ve advanced. Less-affluent conservatives, meanwhile, are far more likely to see immigrants as either competitors for scarce public resources or as a burden on hard-pressed taxpayers.
To unite the right, the GOP ought to embrace a simple immigration reform principle: The U.S. will only welcome immigrants who can pay their own way.
Eat China’s Lunch
On more than one occasion, Donald Trump has said that “China’s just eating our lunch,” and that we ought to retaliate. He’s not wrong.
As automation accelerates, labor costs will be of decreasing importance for manufacturers. This could lead to more “insourcing,” or a return of manufacturing jobs to U.S. shores. But even if the U.S. attracts new manufacturing facilities in large numbers, the number of manufacturing jobs created will likely be modest, as these new facilities will make far greater use of machines than factories of the past. Nevertheless, insourcing of this kind would be an economic boon. Republicans ought to offer a comprehensive agenda for making the U.S. more attractive to manufacturers, through corporate tax reform but also through a renewed commitment to investing in infrastructure—in other words, an economic nationalism rooted in substance, not shopworn nostalgia.
More broadly, Republicans ought to put forward specific policy proposals to improve the lives of workers who lose their jobs to outsourcing or automation. One promising idea is a wage insurance program that provides workers with a strong incentive for rapid re-employment. As Lael Brainard, Robert Litan, and Nicholas Warren proposed in 2005, workers who lose their jobs and then find lower-wage work would receive an insurance payout that would cover up to 50 percent of the earnings gap, up to $10,000 a year for no more than two years.
Defend the Safety Net
One of the hallmarks of the Trump campaign has been his support for Social Security and Medicare, and his insistence that he would protect these programs from budget cuts. To many conservatives, Trump’s defense of these old-age entitlements is his greatest heresy. What they fail to understand is that conservative voters are very fond of these programs, and their fondness can’t be chalked up to simple hypocrisy.
We saw this dynamic at play during the early days of the Tea Party, the last time elite Republicans faced a serious populist challenge. Many conservative intellectuals viewed the Tea Party movement as the realization of their fondest wishes: a grassroots rebellion demanding fiscal austerity. In fact, as Emily Ekins of the Cato Institute has observed, Tea Party members were chiefly motivated by a theory of economic fairness.
Republicans ought to reform old-age entitlements to make them sustainable over the long haul. But in doing so, they must ensure that these programs perform their core functions better than they do today, particularly for the poorest and most vulnerable seniors. To improve Social Security, Republicans might back a package of reforms that would encourage older Americans to work by slashing or eliminating their property taxes and that would ensure that all seniors receive a benefit that would keep them from falling into poverty, which is not currently the case.
More controversially, Republicans should follow Trump’s lead and accept that some of the core aspects of Obamacare are here to stay. Trump often seems confused when questioned about health policy, but he does intuitively understand that Americans hate the idea that people with pre-existing medical conditions might be denied care.
Respect, Not Compassion
Republican anti-poverty rhetoric often reeks of condescension. When George W. Bush spoke of compassion for the downtrodden, it was very clear that he meant well. It’s equally clear, though, that for most poor Americans, a hand up is vastly preferable to a shoulder to cry on.
Encouragingly, a number of conservative reformers have proposed using the tax code to help low-income families. Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, among others, have called for increases in wage subsidies, and their proposals have much to recommend them. One serious challenge, however, is that sliding-scale wage subsidies help workers as they climb the bottom rungs of the job ladder, but they can also discourage them from earning more as they gain experience, because the subsidies taper off as workers earn more income. The Bipartisan Policy Center has proposed solving this problem by replacing the current earned income tax credit with arefundable earnings credit equal to 17.5 percent of the first $20,000 in earnings that would apply to each worker, with or without children. This would make life for low-wage workers much easier, not least by lowering the cost of tax preparation, a huge burden for poor families. Better still, it would remove the disincentive to earn more money.
No New Tax Cuts for the Rich
If Republicans are to win the trust of working- and middle-class voters who’ve grown deeply skeptical of their economic nostrums, they will have to do something dramatic: It’s time for the GOP to abandon its near-obsessive devotion to tax cuts that disproportionately benefit upper-income households.
Virtually every GOP candidate, Trump included, has offered a tax reform proposal that would slash taxes on America’s richest people. But according to a survey conducted last fall, almost one-third of Republicans (31 percent) would be more likely to support a candidate who favored raising taxes on wealthy Americans compared with one-third (34 percent) who’d be less likely to vote for such a candidate and another one-third (34 percent) who were indifferent. Given these numbers, you’d expect that one or two GOP presidential candidates might run on cutting taxes on the rich while one or two others might call for hiking them. Instead, we see elected Republicans march in lockstep on taxes, as though their voters did the same.
I’m under no illusion that Republicans will embrace this agenda tout court, and there’s no question that some of these ideas are more far-fetched than others. This proposal also isn’t comprehensive: I haven’t touched on same-sex marriage or abortion or foreign and defense policy. The point of this exercise is not to dictate exactly where GOP policymakers should go. Rather, it is to demonstrate that the GOP can speak to the interests of working- and middle-class Americans while maintaining conservative principles.
If the Republican Party is to have a future, it must learn from Trump’s rise. By launching a frontal attack on movement conservatism, Trump has demonstrated its weakness and the failure of its stale policy agenda to resonate with voters. In doing so, he is giving conservatives a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change direction.
There is only one way forward in the post-Trump era. The GOP can no longer survive as the party of tax cuts for the rich. It must reinvent itself as the champion of America’s working- and middle-class families. In every campaign, Democrats and Republicans talk about getting the working class and the middle class back on their feet. Those are almost always empty words. The GOP must now become a genuinely populist party, putting the concerns of voters ahead of those of donors. The alternative will be a decade or more of marginalization and defeat, during which the left will have free rein.
Following this path will be uncomfortable for a Republican elite that has grown accustomed to getting its way, and to selling an agenda that’s best suited to the interests of the already well-to-do as an agenda for America. While tossing aside long-held orthodoxies will be difficult, it is absolutely necessary. By embracing populism, this new GOP will have the potential both to speak to Trump’s voters and to grow the party’s base, uniting voters across lines of race, class, and region.
What might a more populist GOP agenda look like? Here is a brief sketch of how the party can change course.
A Pay-Your-Own-Way Immigration Policy
No issue better illustrates the divide between elite Republicans and the party’s base. One recent survey found that a large majority (67 percent) of Republicans favor decreasing immigration levels while only 7 percent of them favor an increase. Nevertheless, leading Republicans, including Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, have backed proposals that would greatly increase immigration levels in defiance of the Republican grassroots. Trump, meanwhile, has used incendiary language to electrify Republicans who oppose immigration.
What accounts for this divide between the policies prominent Republicans have backed and those favored by rank-and-file GOP voters? For high-income Republicans, skilled immigrants are their colleagues, neighbors, and friends, and less-skilled immigrants provide them with the low-cost child care, restaurant meals, and other services that allow them to lead comfortable lives. These affluent conservatives thus take a morerelaxed approach to immigration, which is reflected in the immigration reform proposals they’ve advanced. Less-affluent conservatives, meanwhile, are far more likely to see immigrants as either competitors for scarce public resources or as a burden on hard-pressed taxpayers.
To unite the right, the GOP ought to embrace a simple immigration reform principle: The U.S. will only welcome immigrants who can pay their own way.
Eat China’s Lunch
On more than one occasion, Donald Trump has said that “China’s just eating our lunch,” and that we ought to retaliate. He’s not wrong.
As automation accelerates, labor costs will be of decreasing importance for manufacturers. This could lead to more “insourcing,” or a return of manufacturing jobs to U.S. shores. But even if the U.S. attracts new manufacturing facilities in large numbers, the number of manufacturing jobs created will likely be modest, as these new facilities will make far greater use of machines than factories of the past. Nevertheless, insourcing of this kind would be an economic boon. Republicans ought to offer a comprehensive agenda for making the U.S. more attractive to manufacturers, through corporate tax reform but also through a renewed commitment to investing in infrastructure—in other words, an economic nationalism rooted in substance, not shopworn nostalgia.
More broadly, Republicans ought to put forward specific policy proposals to improve the lives of workers who lose their jobs to outsourcing or automation. One promising idea is a wage insurance program that provides workers with a strong incentive for rapid re-employment. As Lael Brainard, Robert Litan, and Nicholas Warren proposed in 2005, workers who lose their jobs and then find lower-wage work would receive an insurance payout that would cover up to 50 percent of the earnings gap, up to $10,000 a year for no more than two years.
Defend the Safety Net
One of the hallmarks of the Trump campaign has been his support for Social Security and Medicare, and his insistence that he would protect these programs from budget cuts. To many conservatives, Trump’s defense of these old-age entitlements is his greatest heresy. What they fail to understand is that conservative voters are very fond of these programs, and their fondness can’t be chalked up to simple hypocrisy.
We saw this dynamic at play during the early days of the Tea Party, the last time elite Republicans faced a serious populist challenge. Many conservative intellectuals viewed the Tea Party movement as the realization of their fondest wishes: a grassroots rebellion demanding fiscal austerity. In fact, as Emily Ekins of the Cato Institute has observed, Tea Party members were chiefly motivated by a theory of economic fairness.
Republicans ought to reform old-age entitlements to make them sustainable over the long haul. But in doing so, they must ensure that these programs perform their core functions better than they do today, particularly for the poorest and most vulnerable seniors. To improve Social Security, Republicans might back a package of reforms that would encourage older Americans to work by slashing or eliminating their property taxes and that would ensure that all seniors receive a benefit that would keep them from falling into poverty, which is not currently the case.
More controversially, Republicans should follow Trump’s lead and accept that some of the core aspects of Obamacare are here to stay. Trump often seems confused when questioned about health policy, but he does intuitively understand that Americans hate the idea that people with pre-existing medical conditions might be denied care.
Respect, Not Compassion
Republican anti-poverty rhetoric often reeks of condescension. When George W. Bush spoke of compassion for the downtrodden, it was very clear that he meant well. It’s equally clear, though, that for most poor Americans, a hand up is vastly preferable to a shoulder to cry on.
Encouragingly, a number of conservative reformers have proposed using the tax code to help low-income families. Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, among others, have called for increases in wage subsidies, and their proposals have much to recommend them. One serious challenge, however, is that sliding-scale wage subsidies help workers as they climb the bottom rungs of the job ladder, but they can also discourage them from earning more as they gain experience, because the subsidies taper off as workers earn more income. The Bipartisan Policy Center has proposed solving this problem by replacing the current earned income tax credit with arefundable earnings credit equal to 17.5 percent of the first $20,000 in earnings that would apply to each worker, with or without children. This would make life for low-wage workers much easier, not least by lowering the cost of tax preparation, a huge burden for poor families. Better still, it would remove the disincentive to earn more money.
No New Tax Cuts for the Rich
If Republicans are to win the trust of working- and middle-class voters who’ve grown deeply skeptical of their economic nostrums, they will have to do something dramatic: It’s time for the GOP to abandon its near-obsessive devotion to tax cuts that disproportionately benefit upper-income households.
Virtually every GOP candidate, Trump included, has offered a tax reform proposal that would slash taxes on America’s richest people. But according to a survey conducted last fall, almost one-third of Republicans (31 percent) would be more likely to support a candidate who favored raising taxes on wealthy Americans compared with one-third (34 percent) who’d be less likely to vote for such a candidate and another one-third (34 percent) who were indifferent. Given these numbers, you’d expect that one or two GOP presidential candidates might run on cutting taxes on the rich while one or two others might call for hiking them. Instead, we see elected Republicans march in lockstep on taxes, as though their voters did the same.
I’m under no illusion that Republicans will embrace this agenda tout court, and there’s no question that some of these ideas are more far-fetched than others. This proposal also isn’t comprehensive: I haven’t touched on same-sex marriage or abortion or foreign and defense policy. The point of this exercise is not to dictate exactly where GOP policymakers should go. Rather, it is to demonstrate that the GOP can speak to the interests of working- and middle-class Americans while maintaining conservative principles.
