I Was Wrong: The GOP Will Never Be the Party of the Working Class | Opinion

For half a decade following the rise of Donald Trump, I took a leading part in the effort to bring about a populist GOP: a conservatism that would combat the stresses imposed by the market on working people, helping them attain lives of security and dignity. For a time, I believed Donald Trump could deliver such a conservative movement. But now I'm faced with the realization that he couldn't—no one could, because the Republican Party remains, incorrigibly, a vehicle for the wealthy.

It's an unsettling place to be in. While ferociously conservative on cultural issues, I'm increasingly drawn to the economic policies of the Left—figures like Sens. Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, who, unlike the vast majority of leaders in American politics, and especially those on the right, are willing to tackle the corporate hegemony and Wall Street domination that make daily life all but unlivable for the asset-less many.

My turn toward realignment politics didn't come straightforwardly. Having launched my career at the heart of establishment conservatism, I was initially baffled by the Trump phenomenon. I was then an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal in London, preaching free trade and low taxes. Back home, the more Trump bucked orthodoxy—assailing free trade, defending Social Security, hinting support for a public option in health care—the louder the base cheered him.

I should have known better. Two decades earlier, just before I turned 14, my mother and I had emigrated from Iran to the United States. We landed in northern Utah, of all places, home to the relatives who had helped us obtain our green cards. My parents' divorce in the old country, combined with a brutal exchange rate, led to straitened circumstances initially.

While finishing graduate school, my mother worked the graveyard shift at a gas station, and our first home sat on wheels. The only health insurance we could access was the shoddy variety on offer at my mother's minimum-wage jobs. I still remember the terror that gripped us when one of us fell ill—not fear of sickness itself, but of the medical bills that were sure to invade our mailbox afterward. For millions of Americans, that sense of precarity is a permanent condition.

My own sense of vulnerability returned when I became a dad. My son, Max, was born in London, and while the Journal offered private coverage, routine care routed through the National Health Service. Each time my wife and I confronted the illnesses of early childhood, we received decent, humane care from the NHS. And there would be nary a copay, let alone a scary bill.

Not long after returning Stateside, by contrast, we were slapped with a $4,000 bill when Max caught a virus that required a night's monitoring at a hospital. That personal liability, mind you, was after the contribution of my insurance plan at the New York Post, where I was working as the Op-Ed editor. Our family could handle the extra $4,000 expense, but how, I wondered, do working- and lower-middle-class Americans deal with such insecurity? (The answer is, they don't: 57 percent of adults carry often-devastating medical debt or have faced it in the past five years.)

Converting to Catholicism in 2016 pushed the problem of economic justice even further to the forefront of my mind. Right-wing Catholics in my circles had long sought to blend the faith with Paul Ryan-style market fundamentalism. But the more I drank in papal teaching, the less tenable that synthesis appeared. The same moral logic that inspired in me a horror of abortion and euthanasia also inveighed powerfully against the exploitation of the many by the few.

At one gleaming moment in the Trump years, it seemed like the mainly Catholic cohort of intellectuals to which I belonged was poised to bring about a right-of-center party that salved the victims of neoliberal economics, while also paying due respect to their cultural yearnings for "order, continuity, and social cohesion," as I wrote in a much-discussed 2019 essay.

It turned out to be wishful thinking.

Labor was an especially disappointing area. In 2016, Trump's trade-skeptical plank won him the highest share of union households since Ronald Reagan, helping him clinch crucial battlegrounds like Michigan and Wisconsin. Yet his Department of Labor was all-too-typically Republican, led by the likes of Eugene Scalia, an arch-apologist for corporate power and workplace abuses, and brimming with union-busters.

One grimly eye-opening episode for me was the administration's approach to commercial-arbitration in the workplace. Originally intended to mediate disputes between merchants of relatively equal bargaining power, the 1925 Federal Arbitration Act has been steadily expanded by mainly conservative Supreme Court justices since the 1980s, corralling labor complaints into secretive, privatized "courts" where employers set the rules, and workers are unlikely to prevail.

In cases where workers had been forced to "consent" to arbitration as a condition of continued employment, Trump's administration went against his own National Labor Relations Board and insisted that the arbitration clauses be upheld and class actions barred. In one case, this would have meant forcing an employee to shell out $200,000 in individual arbitration expenses to recover $2,000 in overtime owed him by accounting giant Ernst & Young.

By the end of Trump's term, the promise of the realignment remained largely unfulfilled. To be sure, Trump's tariffs against China set in motion a broader decoupling that has only accelerated under his Democratic successor. Beyond that, however, the 45^th president's signal legislative "achievement" was a corporate tax bonanza engineered by Paul Ryan, the then-House speaker.

Much of my disillusionment owes to what wasn't done, rather than what was. GOP populists complained loudly of Big Tech, yet it was progressive congressional staffers like Lina Khan who took the lead on the most serious probes and reform proposals (work Khan has since put to effect as President Biden's competition czar). Trumpians irritably gestured at Wall Street, yet it's Warren who introduced a bill to check the corrosion of the economy by asset-strippers.

One cause of this is the dearth of conservative personnel in Washington actually committed to carrying out a populist economic agenda. But the most important obstacle is also the most intractable and difficult to discuss: Small and regional capital—think of the car dealer toasting the self-made man at rubber-chicken dinners—forms the Republicans' real power base, even as more working-class people gravitate to the party.

Stressed by the topsy-turvy of the market, small entrepreneurs rage against government-linked privileges enjoyed by larger market actors (now recast as "woke neo-Marxists" at ... BlackRock and Meta). They aren't wrong about corporate privilege, yet their political imagination has been limited to smashing the few regulatory structures that still bring the market system under a semblance of political control.

For the small-time rich, moreover, the legitimately aggrieved "worker" is largely a cultural (and sometimes racialized) signifier: more likely a self-employed roofer than a wage-earning customer-service representative and still much less, say, a Filipina-American employed in hospitality.

Conservative class analysis is likewise skewed on the other end, treating adjunct professors as the "elite" while valorizing the likes of Elon Musk as subalterns.

The erratic and undisciplined Trump couldn't have overcome his own party's tendencies, even if he had been blessed with the executive willpower of an Andrew Jackson or the reforming genius of an FDR—gifts Trump decidedly lacks.

Unfortunately, Trump's 2024 GOP rivals are even less interested in bringing about a better political economy; Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has taken his populist uprising to the professors, even as he backs entitlement cuts and privatization, measures desired by no one except hard-core libertarians and Wall Street fee-skimmers.

Insofar as Trump still fumes about political economy and defends entitlements from the GOP's privatizers and benefits-slashers, I still want him to win the primary. But I can't muster the old enthusiasm. Indeed, I increasingly despair of the whole Right, now almost completely lost to a mindless politics that reduces every problem to "wokeness"—including the collapse of a bank whose board was dominated by white men.

The Left's cultural orthodoxies repel millions who would otherwise be drawn to its economic message, me included. Yet I also believe that the material order—how we organize our political economy and class structure—bears heavily on the shape of our culture. Efforts to change the culture without reforming the economy are futile at best.

There are a few shining exceptions on the right: Sens. Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and J.D. Vance are pushing the GOP to rethink some free-market dogmas, and to recover older and saner Republican traditions exemplified by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and, yes, Richard Nixon. This is often a thankless job, since it exposes these lawmakers to the fury of the conservative donor class, while for progressives, their gradualist steps are never enough and their cultural conservatism bars them from being considered allies in progress.

In the long term, such figures may be able to reform their own side, and thereby to forge a new, bipartisan consensus in favor of an economy that works for workers. In the meantime, economically liberal, socially conservative voters like me will remain politically homeless.

It's a maddening place to be, though if I'm to be perfectly honest, it's also quite exhilarating.

Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact and the author of Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It, to be published by Penguin Random House on Aug. 15.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.