A battle for the GOP’s future is under way
The Republicans must move beyond the dog-eared 1980s playbook of tax cuts and deregulation if they are to succeed
Oren Cass
Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin was helped on the campaign trail by former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who is positioning herself for a run for president © Win McNamee/GettyAmerica’s Republican party is on a winning streak.
Its congressional candidates recently claimed the largest lead recorded in 40 years of polling by ABC News and the Washington Post.
In Virginia, a state that has trended steadily leftward, a slate of conservative candidates triumphed in November.
Internally, though, the GOP has just begun grappling with the revisions its agenda will require, if and when its momentum yields governing power.
For some on the right, recent successes prove that the GOP has found its post-Trump footing.
Glenn Youngkin led the Carlyle Group before campaigning in a McKinsey-style fleece vest.
Now he is Virginia’s governor-elect.
From this perspective, there may be no need to address party weaknesses exposed by Donald Trump, or develop a conservative agenda to help today’s working families.
Perhaps the standard issue anti-tax, tough-on-crime, country-club Republican of the past can win the future by incorporating a more aggressive tone on cultural issues and exploiting Democratic incompetence.
Former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley has placed her chips on that bet.
“As we are dealing with changes in our economy,” the aspiring presidential candidate commented in March 2020, with Covid-19 sweeping the nation, “tax cuts are always a good idea.”
Within hours of Youngkin’s win, she stood behind a Heritage Foundation podium to deliver the “Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture”, which proved as dogmatic as it sounds.
Economic proposals from other Republicans to strengthen US industry in the face of China’s rise are “dumb” and “un-American”, she said.
Those policymakers are “basically saying America should be more like Communist China” and they “might as well start calling each other comrade”.
One target of her ire, presumably, was the Republican senator Josh Hawley, whose own speech a few days prior had lamented the attitude that it’s “better to outsource our production to China or Mexico” and proposed “requiring that at least half of all goods and supplies critical for our national security be made in the United States”.
Reasonable people might disagree on whether legislation along these lines is the best mechanism for reshoring American supply chains, but opponents like Haley appear woefully unprepared for the debate.
The name-calling is robust, the logic less so.
American capitalism will beat Chinese communism “every single time”, she said, but China is “continuing to move faster on things, from technology to everything else, that’s a wake-up call for us”.
Government cannot respond to that wake-up call, though, because any public intervention in the market is “socialism lite”.
Republicans have repeatedly made the same error in recent decades, forgetting that a successful political movement must not only attain power, but also govern well.
Neither the recent election wins, nor the performance of GOP House and Senate leadership, nor the rhetoric of the aspiring leaders who would return the party to its pre-Trump sclerosis, suggests the existence of any coherent agenda beyond the dog-eared 1980s playbook of tax cuts and deregulation.
Sure, that’s all one needs for a lecture celebrating Thatcher.
It does little, though, to address the decline of the family, decades of stagnant wages, socially corrosive technology, financial markets run amok, corporate concentrations of power or competition from China.
Fortunately, a battle for the GOP’s future will proceed whether its old guard want one or not, and regardless of who calls whom a socialist.
While elections between Republicans and Democrats determine which party holds an office, it is competition within a party that determines the positions its representative will hold.
Debates within conservative institutions and party primaries to select future congressional and presidential candidates will be far stronger determinants of the Republican future than low-profile, off-cycle contests in which factions invariably unite in preferring their own side to the other.
Heading into 2022, Senate candidates like JD Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona are piloting new platforms that take seriously the need to address contemporary challenges.
Republican senator Marco Rubio recently challenged the market fundamentalists, insisting that US capitalism “must be a capitalism that serves the interests of our country, not the interests of the global economy”.
The Heritage Foundation itself has just welcomed a new president, Kevin Roberts, who wasted no time in challenging that institution’s long-held orthodoxy.
“The breakdown of the nuclear family is a much bigger problem than the lack of economic dynamism,” he observed.
“What does that mean for taxes, trade, regulation, and welfare programmes?”
It means a conservative rethink is well under way.
The writer is executive director of American Compass
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