Republican Party Continues Ideological Pivot Away From Core Values

Future generations of historians will look back on Donald Trump’s complete rewiring of the Republican Party and wonder how he did it. Usually, it takes years for a political party to change its overall course. But with Trump, the GOP went from business-friendly conservative to aggrieved populist in no time at all.

How could this happen? Reason’s Eric Boehm offers a recent incident that shows the change required unreserved buy-in from Republican officeholders eager to stay in power. In this case, it’s a play in one act involving Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, a Cold War-era federal law, and an aluminum plant back home:

In response to the news that an aluminum smelting plant in southern Missouri will soon close, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) has asked—nay, demanded—that President Joe Biden use his powers to keep the plant open.

“I urge you to take the appropriate actions necessary to keep the smelter open, to ensure the continuity of operations, and to preserve production jobs—including by deploying the authorities of the Defense Production Act of 1950,” Hawley wrote in a letter to the White House this week. “Doing so will preserve good-paying union jobs and safeguard national security.”

One could be forgiven if Hawley sounded exactly like a Democratic pol of old. But he’s a Republican, and, not so very long ago, Republicans at least gave lip service to the idea that markets allocate resources, capital, and jobs more effectively than government fiat.

But now, some of the party’s stalwarts seem perfectly happy asking the president to exercise powers he doesn’t have using an act that doesn’t say what they think it does.  All in the name of…union jobs? Or something.

What else can we expect from this enormous course correction?” We need to look no further than Sen. Hawley. In a 2022 Washington Post op-ed, Hawley wrote following the 2022 mid-terms, when the GOP greatly underperformed expectations of a Trump-led “red wave” that “[t]he old Republican Party is dead.”

How dead? Judging by Hawley’s manifesto, the new GOP ought to look a lot more like the old Democratic party:

No nation ever got strong by consuming stuff other people make. We need an economy that produces critical goods here, in this country, and creates good-paying jobs for working people. That means tariffs to foster American industry, local content requirements to reshore manufacturing and taking the shackles off U.S. energy producers. That means new antitrust laws for Big Tech that will bust up monopolies such as Google and restore competition to the marketplace. And while we’re at it, we should start relocating federal agencies such as the Departments of Energy, Interior and Agriculture to middle America. It’s long past time for cosseted policymakers to confront the real-world consequences of their decisions, economic or otherwise.

That sounds an awful lot like another Missouri politician…former Rep. Dick Gephardt. The one-time House majority leader and presidential candidate won the Iowa caucuses in 1988, preaching a brand of economic populism Hawley seems to have made his own.

Consider this 1988 profile of Gephardt from the campaign trail in New Hampshire:

…Gephardt of Missouri, who fashions himself a modern Harry Truman, does not yet have a Fair Deal for a new generation. What he has is a plan to negotiate trade surpluses in a world market where the biggest U.S. competitors are multinational.

To some, however, he is speaking the unspeakable.

“There is a huge group who feels the status quo is good for them, so don’t change it,” says Gephardt. “They are importing goods for Americans. ‘So don’t fool with it because you’re going to mess up what I’ve got.’ You’ve got people literally hired by foreign countries who don’t want this policy to change — Washington lobbyists, advertising firms, people making big bucks off the importation of products, who think they may be affected, don’t understand what I’m talking about.”

Hawley may not have a fraction of Gephardt’s accomplishments in office, but he’s stolen his act. And that act’s populist appeal seems to be staking a firm hold on the party that not so very long ago had a leader who believed “the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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