The Republicans turning on conservative economics

A regressive social agenda lurks behind the New Right's 'progressive' economics + a note on J.D. Vance

Hello readers! Been a bit of an eventful weekend in the US. I’m not going to comment on the assassination attempt because I think all the takes have already been tooken (this is for my Mom - thank you for your indulgence), but I did want to comment on the announcement of J.D. Vance as Trump’s Vice Presidential pick. The 39-year old author and Senator from Ohio cut his teeth as a venture capitalist working for Peter Thiel. Like many Republicans, his Never Trump → Trump Forever conversion was complete by 2021, and he has emerged as one of the former president’s most loyal lapdogs.

Vance is interesting to me, however, because of his long-standing relationship with the National Conservatism movement helmed by Yoram Hazony, whose work I’ve been covering for several years. He appeared at the inaugural U.S. NatCon conference in Washington, D.C. in 2019 (speakers also included Peter Thiel and Senator Josh Hawley, more on him below), and also spoke at NatCon Orlando (2021), NatCon London (2023), and the latest NatCon gathering, which met in Washington D.C. last week.

Along with Hawley, Vance was one of the first U.S. elected officials to fully embed himself in the National Conservatism world, but last week’s gathering underscored just how much the movement has grown in the past five years. Vance was one of seven Republican senators who spoke at the event, and was joined by an array of conservative intellectuals and operatives including Kevin Roberts of Heritage, Rachel Bovard of Conservative Partnership Institute, Vivek Ramaswamy, Josh Hammer, R.R. Reno and—wild card—Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.

What Vance brings to the ticket (other than the electoral votes of Ohio) is a direct line to the energy and institutional prowess of the National Conservatism movement and its aligned partners. These include American Moment—whose founder Saurabh Sharma is also now Executive Director of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which organizes the NatCon conferences—which specializes “in the training and placement of nationalist conservatives in congressional offices, public-policy organizations, allied businesses, and presidential administrations.” And I would be remiss not to mention the infamous Project 2025 overseen by the Heritage Foundation, which has moved firmly into the NatCon orbit under Kevin Robert’s leadership. These forces show the New Right actively cultivating a new generation of intellectuals, staffers, and policy wonks to ensure the next Trump administration can execute its agenda with far greater efficiency than the first time around — when key appointments sat empty and ‘deep staters’ conspired against him.

Today’s newsletter takes a closer look at the economic visions coming out of the NatCon world, and in particular the critique of corporate power found among some of its partisans.

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The intellectuals, elected officials, political operatives, and policy wonks who gathered in Washington D.C. last week were there to survey the wreckage of neoliberalism. Several speakers argued that decades of corporate-friendly legislation, regressive tax cuts, shrinking labor power, and soaring costs of living have hollowed out the American dream. They placed a good deal of the blame at the feet of conservatives who, in the words of Sen. Josh Hawley, are “busy tending the dying embers of neoliberalism. They’re reading their copies of John Stuart Mill and Ayn Rand. They’re still talking about fusionism and its three-legged stool.”

Something that I first observed at the 2023 NatCon conference in London has made the leap across the pond: conservatives are turning on last century’s economic orthodoxies and embracing the sort of social democratic-ish (more on that below) positions that centrist pundits have long decried as too radical for actual Democrats. Judging by the polls, it’s a winning formula: Hawley has been leading his democratic rival by 9-14 points since January.

Senator Josh Hawley speaking at NatCon in Washington D.C.

I’ve written at length elsewhere about the sincerity of the New Right’s economic realignment, and the hurdles they face in achieving victory for the working man (have no doubt that this is a gendered program). Today I want to focus on how Hawley has combined a critique of corporate power with an intensely conservative social vision centered around family, community, and congregation. The best way I can explain it is that conservatives of his ilk have finally discovered Marx and Engel’s The German Ideology and realized that there is a direct relationship between economic conditions and social ones; ergo, one cannot maintain (or rebuild) 1950s-era domestic harmony with daddy at the factory and mommy at the stove without higher wages, industrial policy, labor unions, and state support for families. The resulting vision represents a formidable challenge to both corporate democrats and what’s left of the mainstream GOP.

Economic policy was not the thing that attracted most commentators to Hawley’s speech last Thursday, which proudly embraced Christian nationalism and argued that the genealogy of American democracy can somehow be traced to St. Augustine’s 5th century text, City of God. Here’s a taste of this totally credible, 100%-not-fabricated-out-of-the-thinnest-of-air historical narrative:

We are a nation forged from Augustine’s vision. A nation defined by the dignity of the common man, as given to us in the Christian religion; a nation held together by the homely affections articulated in the Christian faith—love for God, love for family, love for neighbor, home, and country.

And some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. And some will say I am advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. Is there any other kind worth having?

The nationalism of Rome led to blood-thirst and conquest; the old pagan tribalisms led to ethnic hatred. The empires of the East crushed the individual, and the blood-and-soil nativism of Europe in the last two centuries led to savagery and genocide.  
By contrast, Augustine’s Christian nationalism has been the boast of the West. It has been our moral center and supplied our most cherished ideals. Just think: Those stern Puritans, our Augustinian forebears, gave us limited government and liberty of conscience and popular sovereignty.

I can understand why a lot of people got stuck here. But let’s forge ahead and connect these ideas about Christian virtue and the Christian nation to those that Hawley has advanced about economic policy. After all, a man can’t live on piety alone. Indeed, after a standard-issue barb about migrants and our supposedly open borders, Hawley was quick to pivot toward the concrete challenges facing working families:

Good, stable work is in too short supply. Our economy has entered a new and decadent Gilded Age where working class jobs disappear and working wages erode and working families and neighborhoods fall apart, while the denizens of the upper class live a cloistered life behind gates and private security and woke CEOs rake in millions of dollars in pay.

Here we can see how the ‘woke’ social positioning of American capitalism over the last several years serves as a key justification for the assault on corporate power. Grotesque pay disparities, attacks on organized labor, and wage stagnation have existed for a long time, but have only become an actionable target for the New Right when tied to a progressive social agenda (I’m bracketing for the time being my own deep suspicions of the DEI industrial complex as means of coopting and taming radical demands for racial and economic justice of the sort that can’t be easily absorbed into business as usual).

Hawley was not always in the right populist camp, but has accelerated his critique of corporate power in recent years. Sometimes this places him directly at odds with other members of his party, as when he introduced the Ending Corporate Influence on Elections Act last year. The bill is intended to restrict certain forms of political spending enabled by Citizens United v. FEC, and would in particular ban publicly traded companies from making SuperPAC contributions. I haven’t read through the bill in detail, but in principle this is something that a good lefty like me—who thinks our system of campaign finance horribly distorts and undermines our democracy—would absolutely support.

At NatCon, much of his ire was directed his mainstream Republicans and libertarian counterparts — the ones tending to those dying embers of last century’s economic orthodoxies:

Instead of defending the affections that bind us to each other, Republicans of the Bush-Romney era have championed libertarian economics and corporate interests. Their fusionist faith has become one note: money first, people last. In the name of “the market,” these Republicans cheerleaded for corporate tax cuts and low barriers for corporate trade, then watched these same corporations ship American jobs overseas and use the profits to hire DEI experts. In the name of capitalism, these Republicans sang the praises of global integration while Wall Street bet against American industry and bought up single family homes—so that after the banks took the working man’s job, he couldn’t afford a house for his family to live in. Then Wall Street crashed that global economy—multiple times—and the housing market, and these same Republicans kept right on rhapsodizing. And subsidizing. It was all just too big to fail.”

Economist Milton Friedman, whose faith in unregulated markets
and individual responsibility helped reshape American politics

In the shadow of these ruins, he argued, “we need not the ideology of [Ayn] Rand or [John Stuart] Mill or Milton Friedman, but the insight of Augustine.” So what exactly would a 5th century Catholic saint do? It starts, he says, with love, with cultivating the forms of affection that create social bonds. The sorts of bonds that are destroyed when the local factory is closed down and selfish individuals focus on the pursuit of their individual pleasures. Cultivating a virtuous social order requires something much more material than shrill appeals to family values or even the anti-abortion and anti-trans legislation sweeping through many American states:

Republicans can start by defending the common man’s work. In the choice between labor and capital, between money and people, it’s time for Republicans to get back to their Christian and nationalist roots—and start prioritizing the working man."

I often joke that much of the disenchantment with American democracy comes from being forced to choose between the party of capital and the other party of capital that says nicer things about marginalized groups, but here we see Hawley making a pitch for total realignment. As he continued, this pivot will require embracing policies that are an anathema to mainstream Republicans, starting with taxation. “Why should labor ever be taxed more than capital? They should not be. Why should families get less tax relief than corporations? Families should always be first."

He continued to propose the reactivation of usury laws that would ban the crushingly high interest rates that keep millions of Americans permanently indebted, and to voice his support for organized labor. But here too you can see how the desired ascent of the American working man is positioned in opposition to wokeness:

It’s time Republicans embrace unions. The trade unions of the working man are absolutely vital to the future of the working man in this country… I’ve been on the picket line with the Teamsters. I voted to help them unionize Amazon. I supported the railway strike and the autoworkers’ strike. And I’m proud of it. And when it comes to woke corporations, I’ll just say this: if you want to change the priorities of corporate America, make the suits in the C-suite responsible again to an American workforce.

Finally, it’s worth underscoring the social concerns that animate this sort of economic realignment: the right kind of people aren’t having enough children (which, per the standard NatCon argument, makes the country dependent on immigrant workers who undermine national cohesion). Thus, and however progressive some of these ideas might sound, Hawley’s vision comes with several caveats that underscore the chasm that separates him from those of us on the left.

For instance, while his NatCon speech lambasted the Republicans for creating a corporatist economy that is bad for families and referenced the prohibitively high costs of housing and healthcare, Hawley has been no friend to universal healthcare, social housing, or the regulatory state. Similarly, his utopian vision for supporting families is not public-funded childcare, but wage growth that allows one parent (I’ll let you guess who he has in mind) to stay at home to focus on child-rearing:

Time was, a working man could support his family—a wife and children—on the work of his own hands. Those days are long gone. These days Americans toil away in dead-end jobs and cubicles servicing the global corporations while paying outrageous sums for housing and healthcare. They don’t have families because they can’t afford to have the the families they want. No wonder they’re anxious. No wonder they’re depressed. And those that do have children can’t afford to be home with them. Today, two parents have to work to make the kind of money with the kind of purchasing power that one wage got you 50 years ago. So government daycare now shapes our children’s worldview. Screens now teach our children self-worth, or self-criticism. The media and advertising industry shape their sense of right and wrong. You want to put family first? Make it easy to have children, and put mom and dad back in the home.

Here finally we can see what drives the critique of capital and corporate power, which are not problems in and of themselves but impediments to achieving the traditionalist Christian social order. For the the growing chorus of conservative critics, capitalism is merely an instrument, a means to an end, rather than the end itself. And right now, it’s failing, yielding woke kids ready to march in the streets for Palestine rather than happy workers ready to settle down and have babies. It is only in the context of such upheaval that critiques like Hawley’s have begun to go mainstream, and we cannot overlook the fundamentally reactionary and restrictive social vision that he and his comrades advance.