NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {T} o win like Reagan, disavow Reagan and his narrative about America’s past. This is the political strategy toward which some younger Republicans are moving.
Reagan won the disillusioned center in 1980 by picturing America as a past and future land of opportunity. Winning the disillusioned of 2023 is also the goal of many of today’s Republicans. But some of them — in particular a group known as National Conservatives, or NatCons — would court their votes differently. Instead of promising workers or suburban families opportunity, the NatCons promise them protection.
Given the preoccupation with safety that has plagued the country since at least September 11, this dreary emphasis on protection is perhaps predictable. But the protection younger Republicans promise is protection from wrongs done by “elites.” In short, they are inviting a class war.
Rather than focus on individuals — “individual” is becoming a dirty word — the NatCons and others focus on delivering their protection to groups. In the name of such protection, NatCons and some others on the right moot a range of proposals: some kind of higher taxes on those elites, perhaps corporate taxes, some kind of taxes on investment to reduce income inequality, antitrust actions to punish companies that are “too big,” especially tech companies, and tariffs and industrial policy to protect certain industries’ jobs. More commonly held conservative ideas such as border and immigration restriction are also in the mix.
Another goal — perhaps the main point — is higher wages. Some support minimum-wage increases. Others talk about finding a way to give organized labor more influence.
Such demands add up to a call for converting America to an official European-style, group-oriented, class-divided social democracy. That would have have disconcerted Reagan, a man blissfully uninterested in the class divide. Perhaps that is why the younger conservatives don’t like to spell out what they grope towards. Directly disavowing Reagan still spooks them. And, after all, some Reaganites are still very much around. Bemoan “income inequality” too loudly and one of the best of the Reaganites, former senator Phil Gramm of Texas, will emerge from the GOP woodwork to shame you into common sense.
Now the reformers can rest easy. Someone less inhibited than they is making their case for them: David Leonhardt of the New York Times. Leonhardt is a favorite of Democrats. Yet with Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream, Leonhardt captures the sorrows of the average American with more art than any of the conservative essayists so far.
Leonhardt opens his book by giving an accurate and painful picture of the lives of many Americans. At home, workers’ wages can’t cover their costs, and traditional blue-collar jobs evaporate or move away, leaving workers to trail after them in lower paying regions. Thousands of workers lost positions in factories across the land when Washington bet that freer trade with China would serve the cause of democracy in China. Instead, the Chinese regime has used its new wealth to fund an increasingly repressive autocracy. “In hindsight the China policy appears to have been one of the biggest failures of American economic policy,” concludes Leonhardt. If you define economic policy as sustaining American blue-collar jobs with established companies, Leonhardt is surely correct.
When it comes to immigration, Leonhardt likewise captures the concern. Too many people — too many millions of people in fact — are flooding over our southern border. Advocating immigration restriction isn’t necessarily proof of racism, an obvious point but one that is exhilarating to hear from Leonhardt, so much favored by political progressives. In America’s past, people such as Democratic congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Texas made that point, too. Such people “honored immigrants and decried bigotry without believing that more immigration was always better.”
Some of the NatCons yearn to topple Reagan. So does Leonhardt. But he also takes his swipes at Democratic icons. President Bill Clinton, he argues, “was a product of the elite networks that ran the Democratic Party,” and he “governed with neoliberal prose.”
Leonhardt points out that presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Kerry lived and operated as if America were all coast, and treated the Midwest as flyover country. They failed to match President Barack Obama in the department of “speaking respectfully about moderate social views.” Give Leonhardt credit for understatement.
The “Brahmin Left” — essentially, the university crowd — earns Leonhardt’s skepticism because that Left has “alienated many voters with increasingly liberal views on social and cultural issues, including religion, guns, immigration, abortion, gender, climate change and the use of language.” By conceding this, Leonhardt guarantees himself an inbox full of invitations to keynote conferences on “realignment.” Surely a tract that aims to teach strategists how to win America’s working base will mention Hillary Clinton’s revealing reference to that base as “deplorables.” But here — overcome by his own inhibitions perhaps — the author remains silent.
Whether deplorable or not, blue-collar workers are Leonhardt’s focus, and strong trade unions his solution. He summons a misty vision of a happy America in the heavily unionized 1950s, “when unions were at their apex and the American economy was booming.” President Dwight Eisenhower taxed the wealthiest heavily — keeping the top marginal income tax rate above 90 percent. Of course there were loopholes — there always are at such rates. But high taxation, according to Leonhardt, did not hurt the economy. Ike used some of those revenues to promote the kind of government investment Leonhardt seeks, an investment “in both infrastructure and knowledge.”
Leonhardt’s favorite model of the American Dream in action is Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Roosevelt signed America’s most aggressively pro-union legislation, the 1935 Wagner Act, into law. The act effectively made all America union territory, a territory under the thumbs of pro-union majorities in Congress and the White House. This reform Leonhardt rates compelling progress. “After all,” says Leonhardt in the final lines of the book, “the notion of an American dream was invented not during good times. It was invented during the New Deal.”
It is in the choice of the models of 1950s or the New Deal that Leonhardt’s credibility slips. Neither period was what he describes. In the 1950s, Europe and Japan were still too busy bulldozing rubble to compete in automaking or other industries. Without the reality check of competition, American firms could pay workers whatever wages and benefits they demanded. That circumstance, no matter how high GOP/Democratic tariff walls rise, will, as Senator Gramm says, “never ever arrive again.” When foreign competition did emerge in the 1960s and 1970s, the engine of American growth, the auto industry, decayed into the Rust Belt.
As for the 1930s: After the Wagner Act became law, unions politely waited until the presidential election had passed. Then they launched a veritable war against companies, organizing sit-down strikes and idling much of industry. The result was that unemployment rose to 15 percent or higher. Roosevelt himself was so frustrated with the company-union war he had launched that he resorted to Shakespeare, always a sign of desperation in a politician: “A plague o’ both your houses!”
Following the war, and another strike wave in 1946, appalled lawmakers amended the Wagner Act to allow states to opt out of some of its constraints. That opt-out loophole, commonly known as “right-to-work,” Leonhardt dislikes. He says right-to-work “helped employers keep unions out of their workplaces.” Well yes, but right-to-work also helped workers choose whether they wanted to unionize.
As it emerged, they didn’t. Many relocated, along with their companies, to right-to-work states. In the end, right-to-work states replaced all the jobs Detroit or Flint lost — and then some. Right-to-work helped make the “Morning in America” of the 1980s and 1990s possible. If the jobs paid less well, then education was the way to right that wrong. Unfortunately, our vocational schools, high schools, and colleges were not equipped to provide that education.
But never mind. America need not be a landscape — a “painscape,” one is tempted to write — worthy of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The most obvious solutions to American workers’ problems would be to limit illegal immigration, curtail bilingual ed, reward mayors who dare to enforce their own criminal codes, and hand out generous K–12 school vouchers for all.
The old-style blue-collar work is fading, but that does not have to doom Americans who work in the average job. While not everyone is born to code, accumulating factory-floor skills, computer skills, hospitality skills, and accounting skills would ensure raises for most without any federal directive. Lower taxes would enable workers — being a worker is less class and more situation — to start their own enterprises.
Insisting individuals and families define their own path to progress is also vital. For a neat, optimistic summary of a general approach, see Ian Rowe’s excellent Agency. Rowe, who has established schools in the South Bronx and the East Side of Manhattan, has a simple goal when it comes to education: “I want kids to know they can do hard things.” Interventions, Rowe argues, whether of the Democratic or NatCon variety, are “inherently disempowering.”
Rowe doesn’t neglect the importance of the family. In public speeches, he points out to parents and high schoolers that marriage correlates to higher incomes. But he lodges responsibility for the future in the hands of those parents and students rather than in the hands of administrators of various “pro-family” programs.
Nonetheless, Ours Was the Shining Future renders a specific service to angry, tentative conservatives. This book draws some of their conclusions for them. It spells out the likeliest legislation to result from sealing a pact with organized labor. For half a century now, the AFL-CIO has been pushing to abolish right-to-work. It’s more than likely union leaders would exact support for repeal as the price for joining forces with their old devil, the Republican Party. One Republican senator, Josh Hawley, has already made the jump, saying he no longer supports right-to-work.
The effect of repeal would be to lock all of America into the kind of punitive union land that prolonged the Great Depression. The punitive aspect does not trouble Leonhardt, who even suggests that we may get to this prison mode without right-to-work repeal because of the shifting nature of office work itself. As he points out, currently “a factory can respond to a workers’ organizing drive by moving to another state or country.” Yet “a hospital, a retailer or a warehouse supplying nearby stores has a harder time.” True enough — and true especially for workers in a government office, or some other part of the public sector that he would see grow.
Confronting conservatives with the consequences of social-democratic dreams is important. Until lately, common-sense thinkers and Reagan Republicans have had to labor alone on that count. Ours Was the Shining Dream, sometimes perhaps inadvertently, does make the consequences clear. For that alone, we must thank Leonhardt.