While listening to a recent episode of the “Victor Davis Hanson Show” podcast, I heard Hanson make reference to the Republican Party becoming a “conservative working man’s party” under Trump. Memories came to mind of Karl Marx’s International Working Men’s Association (see #1 below). Hanson, a renowned conservative, was adopting the jargon of the historical international Left, the same kind of rigid and simplistic homogenous-class thinking that is the hallmark of Marxian socialism – indeed, all of modern socialism and its more recent iteration as neo-Marxism.
He isn’t the only one. Some prominent MAGA-adjacent Republicans are sounding like Eugene Debs, the last Socialist Party candidate for president to garner 6% of the popular vote (in 1912). An enthusiasm for class warfare is one of the key pillars of so-called National Conservatism since the rise of Donald Trump. And the dictum of class warfare brings in tow a cry for big government. How else to prosecute the class war except with the long and powerful arm of the state? People like Sen. Josh Hawley (R, Missouri), like a shark on alert for the blood of votes in his home state, and reneging on his pledge to support right-to-work laws, announced his opposition to the laws that would actually free the worker from compulsory union membership and payment of dues (see #2 and #3 below). That’s what is meant by right-to-work, and now Hawley opposes it.
Somehow, Hawley’s mental gymnastics has turned the freedom of a worker to choose whether to join a union or not into an unjust imposition. Missouri legislative Democrats, with the support of a small group of Republicans, placed a measure on the Missouri ballot which passed in 2018 to repeal the state’s right-to-work law. As usual, a good portion of union dues were showered on political advocacy to kill the legislation, and as usual the union cash to the tune of $600,000 was lavished on a political consultancy to run the campaign, which doesn’t include all the soft contributions that unions are famous. After which, we have Hawley joining the picket lines at a recent UAW strike against American automakers and announcing, “… I certainly wouldn’t support any federal legislation to impose right to work on anybody.”
Impose? Again, right-to-work is the exact opposite of “impose”. Hawley’s stand against right-to-work is empowering unions to impose themselves on reluctant workers. The rhetoric and Josh Hawley’s brain are incoherent.
Hawley isn’t the only big government firebrand in the GOP tent. Hawley joins Donald Trump’s VP pick, J.D. Vance, in rooting around in the same mental garbage bin conjuring ways to jack up wages through government intervention. Hawley has concocted a “blue collar bonus” to reward, and only reward this class-based constituency using the tax credit gambit to hike minimum wages to $16.50 (see #5 below). Vance to his credit, and true to his Ohio State and Yale academic pedigree, has declared a broader, more philosophical war on “doctrinaire free market economics” to accomplish the same ends. The guy wants to use the power of the state to imitate the Soviet Gosplan, the state economic planning agency. How? Throw up tariffs walls to shield American firms from competition: “You’re going to see a much more aggressive approach to protecting domestic manufacturers ….” (see #7 below). The Soviets did the same thing. He can’t mean all American manufacturing – it’s too big. He’s got in mind those of his region; think Michigan to Ohio.
Vance isn’t done with state interventionism to advantage one group of workers and their select industries. He doesn’t care a lick for the young. Social Security is a trainwreck; it was designed that way from the get-go. The scheme has young workers supporting the elderly. No, in speaking truth to my elderly peers, you aren’t getting your contributions back in your benefit check. A good portion of it comes out of the paychecks of overstretched young workers and their families who can barely afford the mortgage. The ploy was great when 160 workers supported one retiree (1940). It’s not so great when the ratio has been whittled down to under 3 to 1 due to a birth dearth and advances in health care stretching more people into their sunset years (see #8 below). Vance apparently wasn’t a math whiz at OSU and Yale.
Here he is at his most calloused:
“One way of understanding the Social Security problem is, old people can’t work, young people can, babies can’t. So people at a certain age support the babies and the old people.” (see #7 below)
If he isn’t busy working to abandon Ukraine to Putin, he’s dead set on throwing struggling young families into the maw of the AARP.
Hanson, Hawley, and Vance are all bollixed up in their heads. They blame nebulous foreigners, billionaire left-wing techies, Wall Street, and the mysterious force of globalization. It’s the same message peddled by Lenin and his Bolsheviks in the heady days of 1917 in Petrograd. These befuddled firebrands of so-called national conservatism target “elites” as the Bolsheviks did the “bourgeoisie”.
19th century Marxists coined the word “capitalism” to give focus to their rantings and produce a perpetual hate figure: the “capitalist”. Today’s national conservates proffer “neoliberalism” and the “neoliberal”. This neoliberalism is actually the beginning of economics as a field of study. It didn’t originate in J.P. Morgan’s den or the faculty lounge of the University of Chicago. It came into being during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment when people applied reason, empiricism, and science to an understanding of how people organize themselves in making a living. Best and worse practices came to light and economic liberalism was born. Out of it came thinkers such as Jean Baptiste Say and Adam Smith. The “neo” part came about when others (Milton Freidman, F.A. Hayek, Arthur Laffer, George Stigler, et al) resuscitated these earlier insights during a dark period of government interventionism and inflation, insipid economic growth, high unemployment, and the overall social breakdown of the 1970s (see #9 below).
You’d never know that history in the way Vance, Trump and company depict the plight of American manufacturing and blue collars. They’re victims of “doctrinaire free market capitalism” and its cousin “globalization”. And, in their pronouncements, a cabal of bi-coastal financiers and techie zillionaires are hoarding the rewards. Everybody else is reduced to peonage in their mind. Anyway, that’s the story per Vance, Hawley, Trump, and company.
What they get wrong is that American manufacturing was plagued by . . . us! Yes, we did it to ourselves. We distorted our economy by punishing with imperial unionization, regulation, and taxation the kinds of industries that are likely to more conspicuously impact the land, water, air, flora, and fauna. They happen to be the primary industries (ag, lumber, mining), the skilled trades, the muscular occupations, manufacturing, nearly anything that demands brick-and-mortar construction and the need for permits, approvals, reports, consultancies, and a team of lawyers on retainer. It’s a gauntlet that other industries are less likely to face to the same degree.
Versus
We developed a love affair with “clean” industries. In the 1980s, communities more receptive to growth would preface their support with the call for “clean” businesses. Of course, they have a “clean” environment in mind, social and natural. By the 1980s, a cumbersome Leviathan was erected by the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), Clean Water Act and its amendments, Clean Air Acts, Endangered Species Acts and the breeding of state-level knockoffs like the California’s Environmental Quality Act, activist court decisions to broaden the reach of regulatory agencies, etc. Add to the anti-manufacturing legions the empowerment of local gangs of activists exploiting this flood of regulation. It’s a wonder that we have any manufacturing left.
That’s how you clean the air in the LA basin: you regulate manufacturing out of existence. Permissionless industries began to fill the economic space left empty by the war against “dirty” manufacturing. Coding can take place by a teenager with a laptop and the pc was developed by a couple of twenty-somethings in a garage, all accomplished without interference from the local building inspector, state fish and game overseers, air quality district commissars, enforcers from the Army Corps of Engineers, demands for environmental impact reports, etc., etc. What began without permission of a government employee soon occupied pride of place – tech, communications, financial industries – in our economy. We did this, voted for it, and some of us turn around and complain about the results (see #10 below).
What’s the answer among national conservatives (natcons) to the distorted nature of our economy? They lead assaults on the rich and free markets. The reality on the ground, however, is that “neoliberalism” hasn’t been ascendant since, let’s say, the 1920s, maybe before. It’s been talked about, papers filed in scholarly journals, but our government hasn’t been enslaved by it since, maybe, dinosaurs weren’t oil, certainly since the New Deal. Have you taken a look at the Federal Registry of regulations? Here’s a clue: it hasn’t gotten smaller. Natcons have fits over “globalization”, as if we don’t have tariffs. Here’s another suggestion: examine the 4,392 pages of U.S. tariffs in our Harmonized Tariff Schedule. Natcons are feverishly breeding straw men, not unlike their left-wing cousins.
Fact: free markets aren’t free in America. Talk to anybody trying to build a housing project, frack, irrigate, open a new steel plant in a blue state, manage an auto plant with the UAW breathing down your neck. Manufacturing didn’t disappear; they were just discouraged, and the survivors fled the worst blue-state snake pits for those right-to-work states that Hawley now castigates. Listening to the mouthing of natcons sounds like the prescription of low-dose poison to kill intestinal parasites only in overdose amounts.
They are under the delusion that they can calibrate free markets without killing markets. If prior government interventions are any indication, they are fools. It’s regulation that must be carefully calibrated, not markets, much like Bill Clinton on abortion: safe, legal, and RARE.
If natcons occupy key positions in a new Trump administration, watch as they burden our economy with rising costs for consumers and producers which will translate, as it always does, in less opportunity, especially for those striving for upward mobility. We’ll get the tariffs, but not any appreciable reduction in regulation or its multifarious mandates. The Trump economy of his first term was a Larry Kudlow economy, one of cheap energy, tax cuts, and Congressional Review Act rescissions of some Obama regulations. A new Trump economy promises to be a Vance/Hawley one. Two very different beasts.
It’s sad to see Marxism take hold in both parties. Some Republicans are attempting the trick of freeing “Republican Marxism” from the oxymoron category (a contradiction in terms). Their Marxism won’t succeed any better than the Maduro Marxists running Venezuela.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Most mass encyclopedias such as Wikipedia or Britannica have an article on “Karl Marx: Role in the First International of Karl Marx” and “Second International” to describe the history of international socialism.
2. More on Sen. Josh Hawley and his newfound faith in unionization can be found at “Republicans For Coerced Unionization Likely To Remain A Small Caucus”, Patrick Gleason, Forbes, 12/23/2023, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2023/12/13/republicans-for-coerced-unionization-likely-to-remain-a-small-caucus/
3. An additional source of this new “conservatism” can be found at “Josh Hawley’s Pro-Union Folly”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 10/11/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/josh-hawleys-pro-union-folly/
4. Sen. Josh Hawley’s advocacy of raising the “blue collar” minimum wage can be found at “Josh Hawley Proposes Tax Credit to Raise Minimum Wage, Says Large Businesses Could Support Hike”, Newsweek, 2/25/2021, at https://www.newsweek.com/josh-hawley-proposes-tax-credit-raise-minimum-wage-also-signals-support-democrats-15-bill-1571660
5. Sen. Josh Hawley’s endorsement of raising the minimum wage can be found at “’The world has changed’: The scrambled new politics of the minimum wage”, Alex Seitz-Wald, NBC News, 3/8/2021, at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/world-has-changed-scrambled-new-politics-minimum-wage-n1259647
6. More on Sen. J.D. Vance’s embrace of big government can be found in “GOP VP Nominee J.D. Vance Is an Enemy of Free Markets”, Ilya Somin, Reason, 7/15/2024, at https://reason.com/volokh/2024/07/15/gop-vp-nominee-j-d-vance-is-an-enemy-of-free-markets/
7. “The Trump-Vance Ticket is a Repudiation of Free-Market Conservatism”, Victoria Guida, Politico, 7/16/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/16/the-trump-vance-ticket-is-a-repudiation-of-free-market-conservatism-00168578
8. “Social Security History: Ratio of Covered Workers to Beneficiaries” at https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html
9. An excellent synopsis of neoliberalism in “Conjuring Up the Neoliberal Bogeyman”, Samuel Gregg, National Review, 3/13/2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/conjuring-up-the-neoliberal-bogeyman/
10. “The Future of Innovation in the United States: Permissionless or Regulated?”, Mohamed Moutii, Econlib, at https://www.econlib.org/the-future-of-innovation-in-the-united-states-permissionless-or-regulated/
11. An excellent summary of the national conservative and neoliberal divide can be found in “Too Much Deregulation? We Wish.”, Dominic Pino, The Washington Free Beacon, 9/15/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/culture/too-much-deregulation-we-wish/.