David Leonhardt would like us all to meet the “new breed of Republicans,” who, in a break with the Reaganite tradition, are apparently “against inequality,” “more skeptical of the free market and more comfortable using government power to regulate the economy than the party has traditionally been.” For my part, I’d like that new breed to spend a couple of hours drinking beers aboard Senator Joe Manchin’s yacht.
I do not expect to convince Senator J. D. Vance that he is wrong about executive pay, or to persuade Senator Marco Rubio that he should not desire the “reinvigoration of collective bargaining,” or to impress upon Oren Cass that capitalism is, in fact, working just fine. But, as a realist, I do think that these figures ought to think a little harder about the real world. In his paean, Leonhardt insists that the members of this “new” group are the real deal: They are not “disaffected right-wingers who have become moderates without admitting it”; they “really are conservative.” This being so, they will presumably be able to stop for a moment and ask themselves whether their desire to grow the size of the government in the exquisitely tailored fashion they recommend can possibly be compatible with their broad-based hostility toward the federal bureaucracy.
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