Those nefarious right-wing authoritarians are at it again — this time, in the Atlantic. A sitting U.S. senator calls for a “real agenda of economic nationalism.” His party, he writes, should lay out “a pro-family platform of economic nationalism salted with a bit of healthy tech skepticism.” In language echoing Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, the senator denounces neoliberal consumerism for shredding America’s cultural fabric: “The consumerism that was supposed to fill our lives with the material rewards necessary for happiness instead left many feeling empty as our cultures and identities got swallowed up by the shapeless, antiseptic, profit-obsessed international economy.”
“So Josh Hawley is writing for the Atlantic now?” the curious reader might wonder. However, this Atlantic column isn’t by the soon-to-be-senior senator from Missouri. Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy wrote it. Ever since 2015, the respectable organs of opinion in the Beltway have promulgated one piece after another portraying “nationalism” as an existential threat to “liberalism” or “liberal democracy.” In this telling, a Republican turn to “nationalism” would signify the party morphing into some crypto-authoritarian movement. And criticisms about consumerism from the Right were the signs of some atavistic yearning for a return to the Dark Ages.
Of course, such attacks were not exactly fair; today’s “populists” often sound more like Irving Kristol than Huey Long. Meant as a campaign document and not a sober work of political theory, Murphy’s column is itself not always even-handed. For instance, he claims there were “fewer, not more, well-paying manufacturing jobs” when Donald Trump left office than when he entered it. This is true, but primarily because of the COVID pandemic, which temporarily shredded jobs across the board. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, there were more manufacturing jobs in January 2020 than in January 2017. It might surprise Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, and other GOP proponents of family subsidies to learn that Republicans “oppose tax cuts for families with children.” I might also quibble with Murphy’s claim that “neoliberalism” has characterized American policy for the past 70 years. Few would call LBJ a “neoliberal,” and 1979 or 1989 both seem more plausible starting dates for a “neoliberal” era, which has been characterized by a shift away from the New Deal/Great Society welfare state as well as the consolidation of a globally integrated trading order under the aegis of international bodies.
On the level of politics, though, Senator Murphy’s column is a revealing document. It provides another point of evidence for a bipartisan shift toward the national as an organizing concept for politics. Instead of lamenting nationalism, Murphy argues that Democrats offer a more effective form. He points to the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS semiconductor bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act as exemplifying successful industrial strategy. (And Murphy does offer an apt warning for the GOP to this extent: During the Trump presidency, Republicans did not especially deliver on a populist-reform agenda, instead focusing on a giant tax cut and the endless circus of the Trump White House. Republicans left a lot of low-hanging fruit on infrastructure and other areas, which the Biden administration has been quick to harvest.)
Murphy’s column also indicates possibilities for tensions here. The “net zero” approach to carbon emissions celebrated in many elite progressive circles would seem at odds with the project of plentiful, cheap energy for American working families. An anti-carbon agenda also has geopolitical costs, as when the White House pleads with Saudi Arabia to pump more oil while kneecapping production at home. Elements of both the Right and the Left show growing interest in checking corporate concentration, especially in the tech sector — but how to do so remains a contested topic. Tellingly, Murphy did not discuss how immigration, one of the major flashpoints in debates about national opportunity, would fit into a Democratic nationalist agenda. Center-right populists might argue that a rollback of immigration enforcement, a crisis at the border, and a gamut of guest-worker programs all harm civic integrity and economic prospects for working families.
As a further complication, the pandemic era has also revealed the limits of central control. Restoring a sense of local agency (as Murphy says he hopes to do) also likely means local, democratic empowerment — placing real checks on the exercise of power by an “expert” class in centralized bureaucracies. A Democratic party that has become uncritically aligned with the managerial elite may struggle to speak to the concerns of working-class families, who often are alienated by key progressive stakeholders’ cultural imperatives on crime, identity, and education.
Still, Murphy’s piece is an instructive window into how the leadership of both parties has grown increasingly disenchanted by the model of globalization that characterized the Beltway consensus of 20 years ago. Many of the central elements of the Biden administration’s agenda (such as the green-energy provisions of the “Inflation Reduction Act”) represent a break from the ideals of “free trade” circa 2001. Another document that reveals this broader reorientation is a recent viral Substack post by former Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith. Diagnosing an “end of the system of the world,” Smith argues that the world is shifting in a more multipolar direction, in which geopolitical blocs compete. While Smith is well-regarded in many center-left circles, many “nationalists” on the right and some postliberals have also argued that geopolitics is now entering a more multipolar paradigm — which in turn demands a shift in U.S. economic and foreign policies.
How this will cash out in policy remains to be seen, but this column in the Atlantic shows Democrats trying to claim the language of nationalism for themselves.