MILWAUKEE — Former President Donald Trump’s pick of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his running mate, along with Vance’s acceptance speech praising the working man while bashing big business and elites, suggests that the Republican Party, long seen as the party of the rich, could become a working-class populist party.
It’s a natural progression in many ways for a party that was inching toward populism a decade before Trump’s drain-the-swamp talk. But Vance’s species of populism, which increases the government’s role in the economy and castigates corporate profits, is an odd fit in the GOP, which still hangs on to the limited-government principles Vance blasts as too “libertarian.” It’s also awkward at a convention populated by business owners, lobbyists, and Washington elites.
“We need a leader who won’t sell out to Big Business,” Vance said in his acceptance remarks Wednesday night, “but who will stand up for the working man, union and non-union alike.”
The populism of Vance’s speech was only slightly uncomfortable for this Republican crowd, but his policy proposals as a senator are downright contradictory to party orthodoxy.
Vance has called for a higher minimum wage, industrial policy to protect U.S. manufacturers, and generous family subsidies. Beyond that, he has praised activist Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan, who is reviled by conservatives in Washington.
Vance’s populism could create two different points of tension with the Republican Party:
- Vance’s anti-corporate talk is an awkward fit at a convention populated by corporate lobbyists and business owners and by very few working-class men or women.
- Vance’s advocacy for an activist federal role in the economy clashes with deeply held Republican beliefs in limited government and individual responsibility.
Most delegates I interviewed about Vance and the party’s direction avoided those difficulties and instead focused on the ways in which the GOP could already claim to be the natural home for the working man.
“I think it’s always been that way,” Florida delegate Tom Moffses said. “I think people just realized it now. … I can’t see where the Republicans were not for the worker.”
“It has been for a while,” Montana State Rep. Steven Sheldon replied when I asked him if the Republican Party could become the working man’s party. “Of the labor bosses I’ve talked to as a legislator, 65 or 75% of the leadership are leaning Republican now.”
In what ways is the GOP the better champion of the working man? Most delegates pointed to Democrats’ attacks on domestic energy and blue-collar jobs.
“They destroy their jobs,” Sheldon said. “When they killed the XL pipeline is a great example. Hundreds of thousands of jobs that were already in the works, they crushed.”
This has long been the heart of the GOP’s appeal in Appalachia —Democrats hate coal, and Republicans love it. Democrats are against oil and Republicans want to “drill, baby, drill.”
Aside from economic matters, the Republicans have laid claim to cultural populism, particularly when it comes to schools.
Democrats are inextricably allied with teachers unions, and their donors have funded ideological takeovers of school boards. These liberal activists work to indoctrinate students into extreme ideologies, explicitly tearing children from their parents. This ideology, both in K-12 education and in universities, comes at the expense of actually educating children and young adults.
Republicans have always been much more vocal in their support for police and the military. In the shadow of Democrats’ 2020 embrace of anti-police rhetoric and policies, this is an even easier blue-collar conservative angle.
Immigration stands as both a cultural and economic issue where today’s GOP can claim to be the working man’s party. Mass immigration might provide cheaper lawn care for the wealthy, but it means lower wages for natives without college degrees and for earlier immigrants.
Two Buffalonians at the convention pointed out that the massive number of migrants being bussed into their city is disproportionately affecting the working-class neighborhoods.
“They put them up at Days Inn, and that’s not in the wealthy school districts,” one Buffalo native named Brian explained. The blue-collar school districts then get overwhelmed with new students whose English is poor, demanding more resources.
And the Republican Party today is promising to take on the entrenched bureaucracy, which uses its power to subvert the will of democratically elected leaders all while making handsome salaries and pensions. For all their self-conceit as the defenders of democracy, Democrats do everything they can to protect these “experts” from Democratic control.
This much populism is pretty easy for almost any Republican to swallow — even if the immigration restrictionism and culture-war talk grates on the country-club crowd.
“Right now their populist platform is a conservative platform,” Pinellas County, Florida, GOP Chairman Adam Ross said. “So there’s some variances too between Trump and Reagan, but not on anything so divergent that it upturns the applecart.”
Vance goes further
But Vance ventures beyond this safe ground. He advocates trade policy optimized for factory workers rather than for U.S. consumers. He also bashes Big Business and rhetorically sides with workers.
Bashing Big Business can fit decently with conservatism — even with fairly mainstream Republican thought. These days, when Disney advances transgender ideology and when Big Tech censors conservative voices, it’s clear that corporate America is not a natural ally of conservatives.
Even before the recent Great Awokening, corporate America was a roadblock to conservative policy priorities. Tax simplification provides no benefit to massive multinationals whose competitive advantage includes the ability to arbitrage, dodge, and tweak tax law. Government largesse largely flows to large corporations. A party that believes in limited government will have plenty of beef with corporate lobbyists.
But the median Republican operative or delegate is as likely to be pro-business as he is to be pro-free-market — and very vulnerable to never seeing the distinction.
In Milwaukee, one lifelong Republican operative expressed heartburn over Teamsters President Sean O’Brien’s remarks. Criticizing the Chamber of Commerce and defending collective bargaining struck this old hand as “collectivist” and contrary to the principles of the party.
Collective bargaining, of course, is capitalistic behavior. But if your understanding of capitalism has a pro-business and individualistic shading, then collective bargaining seems antagonistic.
And so one of Vance’s obstacles is that many Republicans see business as their permanent ally and labor organizing as their ultimate enemy. Overcoming this set of allegiances will take plenty of work.
Shifting from vibes to policy, Vance also introduces some conflicts with the establishment of his own party.
The conflicts begin with international trade. Here, Vance has an ally — most of the time — in Trump and some fellow travelers in the Republican Senate Conference.
“Tariffs are not ‘government intervention,’’’ Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) told me hours before Vance’s speech. “Tariffs are what most countries normally do. … In the absence of a trade agreement, tariffs is what you normally use to protect your own markets.
“There’s this growing realization, and, frankly, it’s something that took me a while to fully appreciate, of how important it is to have a domestic industrial capacity,” he continued.
Expanded aid to families is another area where Vance pushes the party beyond its traditional comfort zone. Rubio, in 2019, was the champion of expanding the child tax credit — a move that aggravated some conservatives. Rubio bragged about that accomplishment at the convention, and didn’t reject going further.
“If we’re going to be rewarding behavior in our tax code, we should be rewarding families,” Rubio said “It’s expensive to raise children in our country, and that’s the most important investment in America is in our children and their future.”
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Vance, of course, has suggested he would go further than child tax credits and tariffs — that he wants the government to actively curb corporate power, resist financialization, and prop up the family.
There’s plenty of conservative overlap in these areas, but there’s even more tension with Republican orthodoxy. He’ll have his work cut out for him.
