It’s a dead end for the Right.
“I’m a conservative. I’m just not angry about it.” —Bill Lee, governor of Tennessee
In a speech at the Reagan Library on Tuesday, Arizona governor Doug Ducey observed that it’s harder to answer the question “What does the Republican Party stand for?” today than it was during Reagan’s presidency. “We have to figure out where Republicans — and conservatism — are going to go and how we best govern,” Ducey said.
Toward that end, Ducey suggests looking at some of the lessons of the Reagan era, encourages a focus on public-policy solutions to real challenges facing Americans, and argues for prioritizing policy and ideals over attitude. Ducey offered an insightful critique of the current state of the Right:
In his farewell address, Reagan reminds us: “Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: ‘We the People.’ We the People’ tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us. We the People are the driver, and the government is the car. And we decide where it should go.”
Sadly, this is not where the Republican party is today — at least at the federal level. I believe a dangerous strain of big government activism has taken hold, and for liberty’s sake we need to fight it with every fiber in our beings.
A vocal corner of conservative politics is defined more by attitude — and anger — than commitment to a specific set of ideals. A growing segment of today’s conservatives are just as happy bossing us around and telling us — and businesses — how to lead our lives as the progressive left is.
I look at the party and worry that candidates are more defined by their attitudes than the policies they propose. And yes, a good many small government conservatives have morphed into bullies — people who are very comfortable using government power to tell companies and people how to lead their lives.
It’s a perilous place for us to be. Because once you adopt that mentality — that government knows best and is going to tell you what’s acceptable for how to live your life or how to treat employees — we are sharpening the knife the left will eventually use on us.
My friend Bill Lee, Governor of Tennessee, puts it this way: “I’m a conservative. I’m just not angry about it.”
Ducey asked, “When did grievance resolve anything?” And Ducey reminded his audience: “We’re the happy warriors.”
The governor’s remarks are as refreshing as they are correct.
He goes on to discuss the merits of federalism as an answer to the question of where the right goes from here, which I encourage you to read in full. (Younger readers should also check out his thoughts on Alex P. Keaton at the top.) But I want to stay on the subject of grievance, which I wrote about in “Forget the Economics of Grievance,” in the February 21 issue of National Review.
Nationalist-populist policies won’t help American workers. President Trump’s major successes — including his corporate tax cuts — were precisely the policies that were not nationalist-populist and that were not rooted in an economics and ethos of grievance.
Using the bully pulpit to browbeat Foxconn didn’t help workers. I wrote in NR: “In a free society, businesses make long-run decisions based on real-world factors, not on the president’s thumping his chest and howling ‘America first.’”
The trade war with China didn’t help manufacturing workers, it hurt them.
Trump’s successors — e.g., Missouri senator Josh Hawley — won’t fare any better if they continue on their current path. From my February NR essay:
Few of the major policy goals of Trump’s successors can be expected to help the working class any more than his jawboning of corporations did. Breaking up large technology companies, going after pharmaceutical companies, and imposing taxes on financial transactions aren’t about helping workers. They’re about expressing grievance against a social class on behalf of workers — what you might call “grievance-onomics.”
Protecting manufacturing workers from imports does have a certain logic to it. But the effects of trade restrictions on the price of intermediate goods and producer prices would be the same as they were with Trump’s trade war. The same goes with the threat of retaliation. There is every reason to believe that additional trade restrictions would hurt manufacturing workers, to say nothing of workers in general, consumers, and the broader economy.
The eagerness to continue offering the domestic manufacturing industry protection from imports is one manifestation of a longing on the right for industrial policy. Long derided by free-market conservatives, industrial policy also will not help the working class or the nation as a whole and should be avoided. The standard questions about industrial policy are worth asking: Why should we expect the government to do a good job picking winners and losers? Why should we think the government will do a better job allocating scarce resources across industries and businesses than the market will? If the government is involved in microeconomic intervention — say, supporting domestic semiconductor or pharmaceutical manufacturers — then how will it avoid slipping into cronyism and corruption?
“We don’t make things here anymore,” lamented Senator Hawley in a 2019 speech. This isn’t true. (The senator implicitly acknowledged as much when he went on to say, “At least, not the kinds of things a normal person without a fancy degree can build with his hands” — which sounded more like grievance-onomics than economics.) If anything, manufacturing output was on an upward trend after it took a hit in the 2008 global financial crisis, and it has recovered nicely from the pandemic.
Governor Ducey is right that much of this is attitude and not substance. And that attitude can be harmful to the very workers who should be a major focus of policy. More from my NR essay:
Grievance-onomics indulges a narrative that workers are victims who don’t have agency and are players in a “game” that is “rigged” against them. This is analytically false — e.g., the link between worker productivity and compensation is empirically strong. More than that, it is a terrible message to send to workers. If workers come to think of themselves as victims who can’t get ahead, then why will they try to get ahead? Apostles of grievance-onomics risk creating among workers the very problems of economic stagnation and immobility that they falsely claim beset us.
Yes, the economic pessimism of conservative nat-pops is misplaced. Income inequality has been stagnant or falling for over a decade. Inflation-adjusted wages for typical workers have grown by around one-third over the past three decades. Most adults today have a higher household income than their parents enjoyed at similar ages. The middle of the labor market has not been permanently hollowed out. The American dream is not dead.
Though Trump’s blend of pessimism, populism, and nationalism has failed, his focus on workers points in a helpful direction. The challenge for conservatives is to craft a policy agenda for workers that will be actually effective rather than merely cathartic.