Strange Alliances

Where national populists can work with people that they normally disagree with.

Primaries are important, and multiple 2022 candidates are running on platforms that are broadly aligned with a national populist message. However, it’s unrealistic to believe that we’re going to unseat every incumbent or even win every open seat in the House or Senate, to say nothing of local and state offices.

This means that national populists must not only become open to the idea of forging tactical alliances with other factions, we must actively seek such alliances.

The Current Landscape

To be extremely reductive, there are currently three major factions within the GOP:

• Libertarians - This faction would include people like Rand Paul, as well as many others who were elected during the Tea Party-led red wave of 2010. Of the three factions, this one is the most committed to the GOP’s message on the proper size and scope of government, taxes, and regulation.

• Neoconservatives - This faction generally endorses a Reaganite economic agenda but prioritizes matters of foreign policy, most notably by pushing for expensive military interventions abroad. Neocons are often more moderate than members of the other factions on immigration and social issues.

• National populists - This faction is the hardest to define because it’s the one that began to congeal most recently. So far, national populism has been defined by the ways in which Trump differentiated himself from his primary opponents in 2016, namely by emphasizing immigration as a key issue, promising to end regime change wars, and departing from conservative orthodoxy on trade. In the post-Trump era, many national populist commentators have begun to stake out novel positions within other areas of policy, such as healthcare, education, and industrial policy. Because national populism is a relatively new and still somewhat heterodox perspective within the GOP, there’s less unanimity among its adherents than there is among members of the other factions. 

Keep in mind that, in defining these groups, I’m describing their representatives in elected office (or candidates for elected office), not necessarily their most fervent supporters outside of government. For example, many libertarian commentators call for open borders, and indeed, the dissolution of national borders is arguably consistent with a radical pro-market orientation and the desire for a less interventionist state. In practice, though, most Republican voters - even those who hold strong libertarian sympathies - take a more practical view of immigration-related issues, and they would be unlikely to elect anyone who ran on a platform that included open borders. Consequently, many legislators who might be classified as libertarians are reasonably strong on border security.

And, of course, it’s worth noting that many officeholders don’t fall neatly into one category or another. These labels represent loose clusters, not hard divides.

Overlap with Libertarians

The administrative state is central to much of America’s dysfunction. It suffers from strange selection mechanisms, pervasive ideological biases, and an untenable degree of insulation from political accountability. Traditionally, libertarians have been especially well-attuned to the problems of the administrative state because these problems do a great deal to support the broader libertarian critique of government power. While libertarians may seek to take on the administrative state as part of their efforts to reduce the size and scope of government overall, national populists would do well to join them in this fight, albeit in pursuit of the more modest goals of making government more functional and restoring its alignment with the needs of the American nation-state.  

Generally speaking, national populists will fare better in the arena of electoral politics than they will within the federal bureaucracy, so it would be wise to support efforts to strengthen both Congress and the White House relative to independent or quasi-independent agencies. For example, a piece of legislation authored by Rand Paul, the REINS Act, would limit the power of the administrative state by subjecting any regulation with more than a hundred million dollars in economic impact to congressional approval. It may not seem like this would move the needle much on its own, and perhaps it wouldn’t, but the broader goal should be to put power back in the hands of the people’s representatives. 

There are other cases where, instead of directly reducing the scope of government, libertarians seek to subject the allocation of federal funding to market mechanisms. One notable example is school choice. Decentralizing the educational system and making it more responsive to the needs of parents and students is one goal that virtually all Republicans share. More generally, even where national populists would like to maintain federal funding for some purpose, they might reasonably prefer the judgment of markets to that of unaligned bureaucrats.

Returning to regulatory issues, one area where national populists and libertarians might share substantive, and not just procedural, goals is the overregulation of the physical world. Might not regulatory relief for the manufacturing sector, for instance, complement and enhance populist efforts to level the playing field on trade and to implement a thoughtful industrial policy? Libertarians would absolutely resist the latter goals, but there’s no reason we can’t work with them on the former.

Finally, there’s obvious overlap between national populists and libertarians on matters of foreign policy, particularly the need to dramatically scale back our presence in the Middle East.

Overlap with Neocons

While national populists seek to end regime change wars in the Middle East, we recognize that China is one of the greatest geopolitical threats the United States has ever faced. Figures such as Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton, who are sometimes identified as neocons, have been good on this issue. While they continue to favor a more expansive presence in the Middle East than most populists could support, to the extent that their focus is shifting to China, it may be possible to identify areas of common ground.

For example, a bill authored by Rubio would limit technology transfers to China, place a tax on multinational corporations commensurate with the cost of such transfers, and forbid federal contractors from purchasing equipment from Huawei, among other things.

Additionally, any serious effort to take on China and restore American dominance would require a restructuring of the American domestic economy, which could easily happen along lines that populists would be pleased with. A report released by Rubio’s office titled American Investment in the 21st Century, concludes that American markets are now defined by financialization and a low rate of business investment compared with the recent past, and that these trends drive technological stagnation, flat wage growth, and diminished opportunities for workers. These are the very concerns that animate national populism.

Given Rubio’s past, more doctrinaire laissez-faire perspective on domestic policy, one must wonder whether he wasn’t forced into a confrontation with the realities of American economic decline by his desire to revive American competitiveness with China. Other China hawks, such as Tom Cotton, have come to similar conclusions about the relationship between domestic policy and national security, though they generally haven’t stated these conclusions in as sweeping a way as Rubio has.

A New Center of Gravity

Each era has its own dominant faction. In the aftermath of 9/11, neoconservatives dominated the Bush administration. Disillusioned with the party establishment and fearful of the consequences of an Obama presidency, Republicans moved in a more libertarian direction under the auspices of the Tea Party. In 2016, the burgeoning national populist movement found its voice in Donald Trump, and Trump attempted - with a level of success that’s still hotly debated - to balance all three of these perspectives.

I’d like to see a GOP that’s centered on national populist priorities, but we can have no expectation that the party is suddenly going to become a monolith. Historically, American governing coalitions have been forced to manage tensions between their parts, and any future national populist-led coalition will be no exception.

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