A Glimmer of Hope in the GOP

Yesterday, in a piece on the government shutdown, I noted in passing an interesting trend in the Republican Party: Trump devotees who are breaking with him over a more traditional form of populism. I’d like to explore that a little more today.

Trump practices a form of huckster populism. He’s a demagogue playing to people’s resentments and prejudices while he and the Trump Crime Family laugh at them all the way to the bank, or wherever crypto is sold. Trump’s special talent is the distraction. He gets his supporters so worked up over all things woke that they look the other way while he picks their pockets.

But there is now emerging a more pure form of populism, one that also attacks the boutique cultural obsessions of liberal elites while actually promoting economic policies that help blue collar workers.

Yesterday, I mentioned one of those pols, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has broken loudly with Trump over the Jeffrey Epstein files, but more to the point, also over the government shutdown as it relates to health care premiums. Trump doesn’t care that, come Saturday, Americans who benefit from the ACA will start staring down premium increases of around a thousand dollars a month. Taylor Greene claims she does care.

Then there’s Missouri’s Republican Sen. Josh Hawley. Hawley’s been carefully carving out this socially conservative/fiscally liberal position for a few years now. At a Senate hearing in 2022, Hawley masterfully took down a Cal Berkeley professor over transgender issues — though in truth that may have had more to do with the cluelessness of the prof than it did with Hawley’s questioning. She couldn’t bring herself to admit that women have children. Still, it’s the first thing that comes up when you Google Hawley’s name.

So, Hawley’s in the mainstream on the woke stuff. But he’s also pursuing an economic agenda that could be mistaken for a Democrat. In fact, he’s partnering with Bernie Sanders (okay, not technically a Democrat for some reason I can’t understand) on a bill capping credit card interest rates at 10%.

And earlier this week he penned an oped in the New York Times in which he bemoaned the impending loss of SNAP (food stamp) payments beginning on Saturday if the government shutdown isn’t resolved by then. Here are some things that struck me about that piece.

He didn’t blame Democrats. I expected Hawley to write about all the suffering that might happen because of the SNAP lapse, but then quickly pivot to heaping all the blame on Democrats for not supplying the votes to end the shutdown– but only on Republican terms. But he didn’t do that. Instead he wrote, “Last I checked, members of Congress are still getting paid. Republicans blame Democrats, and Democrats blame Republicans, but all these people have food to spare. One suspects that if senators couldn’t buy groceries, the government would never close down again.”

I have a hard time disagreeing with any of that.

And he struck more themes that even liberal New York Times readers could relate to. He touched the JFK mantle when he recalled Kennedy’s trip to West Virginia as a candidate in 1960 and his pledge that, “We will see to it that every American is fed and fed right.”  Food stamps were enacted a year after Kennedy was assassinated — thanks to LBJ, who it is less fashionable to credit for anything.

For good measure Hawley added: “America is a great and wealthy nation, and our most important wealth is our generosity of spirit. We help those in need. We provide for the widow and the orphan. Love of neighbor is part of who we are. The Scripture’s injunction to “remember the poor” is a principle Americans have lived by. It’s time Congress does the same.” That’s a whole lot more Social Gospel than it is fire and brimstone. It’s a lot more nuns on the bus than it is Cardinal Burke.

And he finished with this: “The character of a nation is revealed not in quarterly profits or C.E.O. pay, but in how it treats the small and forgotten — the last, the least, the lost. America is a great nation precisely because we have loved our neighbors as ourselves.” Reminds me of Bobby Kennedy’s speech about the gross national product.

And, you know what, that’s such a great quote from RFK (the good RFK, the original RFK) that let’s quote it at length here even if it’s a little off point:

Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman‘s rifle and Speck‘s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Now, to be clear, I am no populist of any stripe. My problem with populism is that it’s fundamentally about scapegoating. There’s always someone else to blame and it tells you that you’re the helpless victim of big trends you can’t control. It’s about “the one percent” or “the illegals” or the “pointy headed intellectuals.”

I strongly disagree with that view. Instead, I think we are primarily individuals who are responsible for our own lot in life. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t help each other out. We all fall on hard times, sometimes through no fault of our own and sometimes entirely due to our own failings. But nobody should starve and nobody should go homeless and everybody should have a fair chance at success based on their own hard work. We shouldn’t outlaw second chances. What I hate — and I do hate it — about populism is that it’s so fatalistic. At its core it is a very dark view of life.

But here’s the thing. I have little hope for the Republican Party. It’s become a cult of one awful man. And I don’t see it ever returning to the Main Street conservative values of the likes of Ike or Reagan or Mitt Romney. So, what’s a plausible way back to some kind of party that isn’t just a banana republic outfit of misfit toys?

Josh Hawley may have the answer. Would I vote for him? Well, if all I knew about the guy was what he just wrote in the Times, maybe I would. But I also know that he led the fight in the Senate to overturn the 2020 election — an act disqualifying in itself. And he lamented the cuts to Medicaid in the One Beautiful Bill and then voted for it anyway. And he’s still a populist, albeit a less virulent form of the malady than Trump is.

Still, what Hawley and Taylor Greene represent — in heavily flawed packages — is a break with Trump and a way forward for the Republicans that could be a lot better than their current direction.