Congressional Republicans Ran As Populists — It’s Time To Back It Up

New York Post columnist Isaac Schorr seems up in arms that Donald Trump and leading conservative Republican congressman Chip Roy are contemplating a tax hike on the rich in order, as Trump puts it, “to help the lower and middle-income workers.” Schorr accuses populist Republicans of trying to “virtue-signal GOP-allegiance to the little guy.” He warns these disputes could derail Trump’s “beautiful bill” and even deprive Republicans of the chance “to avert a blue wave in 2026.” 

Although there’s no reason right now to expect a “blue wave,” especially in view of the fractured state of the Democratic Party. Schorr, like other representatives of Bush Republicanism, responds to the populist revolt against the wealthy by reciting certain economic axioms. Although he finds some political value in these tax hikes, he thinks that “it’s sure to prove fleeting compared to the longer-term consequences of limiting the economy’s potential.” (RELATED: PAUL GOTTFRIED: Trump Is Leading A New Legacy)

Allow me to point out two problems with Schorr’s argument. One, there may be no dire consequences to hiking the taxes paid by the rich, providing those hikes are not of the confiscatory kind or irreversible. And this step may be more useful in winning support for the bill, even from Democrats who at least pretend to want to soak the rich, than trying to cut further government programs. Schorr is right that there are lots, lots more things conservatives would like to see the government cut, like anything that smells of wokeness. But the point, as Schorr rightly insists, is working out a bill that will pass, which means holding on to the votes of wobbly Republicans like Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and (yes!) Mitch McConnell. It may be easier to keep these Wobblies on board and even bring a few Democrats along by hiking taxes on the rich than cutting deeper into social programs that Schorr and I both hate.

Two, Schorr may not have noticed the rise of the populist Right, which looks nothing like the Republican Party that gave us such Wall Street-friendly presidential candidates as Bob Dole, George W. Bush, and Mitt Romney. That party has now faded away because it did nothing for the American working class, except export their jobs to foreign countries while keeping their wages depressingly stagnant. Moreover, most of our highest earners reserve their biggest donations and votes for the Democratic Party. The affluent have formed business alliances with the Democrats and are generally in sympathy with the party’s woke programs. Far more than in the past, it is social morality that divides and unites Americans. Economics is not a determinant of partisan loyalty to the degree that it once was. And for a very good reason. 

The major source of political division in our society is no longer between those who accept and those who are opposed to the modern welfare state. There is no way that entity can be abolished, no matter how one feels about its existence. Moreover, there is a large class of crony capitalists, most of them in the Democratic Party, who live off our proliferating government programs, like the Democratic beneficiaries of Green Energy boondoggles and the directors of NGOS (who are anything but non-governmental). 

I recall a time (over sixty years ago) when a Republican operative explained to me that what distinguishes his party from its opposition is “They’re Keynesians and we’re not.” Everything political was reducible to whose economic theory you accepted, that of the English advocate of government welfare spending or someone like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, or Ludwig von Mises. Note, I’m not saying that different economic perspectives don’t matter historically (they obviously do). But I think cultural differences have become more critical than they were in the past; and this variable affects how political sides act. (RELATED: Trump Slashes Federal Overreach In One Fell Swoop)

The Right is now allied with the working class, which seems far less affected by the woke cultural revolution than corporate heads, green energy manufacturers, stockbrokers or designers of sensitivity training classes. A cultural traditionalist (and Trump’s vice president) J.D. Vance has bewailed “the tragedy of declining union membership”. Of course, Vance was talking here about blue-collar unions, not public sector organizations, which in the present cultural wars are invariably on the left. The present populist Right would have no compunctions about dumping everything in the public sector that doesn’t benefit “lower and middle-income workers” or help protect the US against foreign and domestic enemies, including the violent illegals whom the Democrats invited in. Equally significant, the populist Right feels under no obligation to attend to those moneybags who keep their enemies awash in donations.

The late Charles Krauthammer once chided a Republican politician for his “historical blindness,” that is for not understanding the importance of the American civil rights movement. Allow me to enter my own choice for an epoch-making event, the transformation of our Right, something the import of which Isaac Schorr may not yet have fully glimpsed.      

Paul Gottfried, Ph.D., is editor-in-chief of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is the Raffensperger Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, a Guggenheim recipient, and and is the author of numerous articles as well as 13 books. Passage Publishing will be releasing The Essential Paul Gottfried, Essays from 1984 to 2024.